单选题At dawn one morning in early May, Sean Cosgrove is stashing piles of maps, notes and photocopied documents in his gym bag before heading for West Milford High, a rural school in northernmost New Jersey. On his 30-minute commute, the young former investment banker tries to dream up new ways of lifting the monumentally forgettable Mexican War off the textbook page and into his students" imaginations. Can he invoke the storied memories of Robert E. Lee, who cut his first military exploits on the plains of Veracuz—or will he be met with thundering responses of "Who"s Lee"? Should he raise James K. Polk out of the mystic chords of memory, and hope, for a nanosecond, that the kids will care about the first U.S. president who stepped aside because he"d accomplished everything he wanted? Let"s think some more. Well, there"s always the Alamo. And hey, isn"t that the teachers" parking lot up ahead? It"s never an easy task. These big kids in big jeans and ball caps, come to his history classes believing that history is about as useful as Latin. Most are either unaware or unimpressed that the area"s iron forges once produced artillery cannon for George Washington"s army. Their sense of history orbits more narrowly around last month"s adventures on "Shop Rite Strip", the students" nickname for downtown West Milford, once a factory town, now a Magnet for middle-class vacationers. Cosgrove looks uncommonly glum as he thumbs through a stack of exams in the teachers" lounge. "I can"t belive anyone in my class could think John Brown was the governor of Massachusetts, "moans Cosgrove, 28, pointing to one student"s test paper. He had to be sleeping for days on end. The same morning, students in his college bound class could name only one U. S. Supreme Court justice—Clarence Thomas. All his wit, energy and beyond-the-textbook research can"t completely reverse the students" poor preparation in history, their lack of general knowledge, their numbness to the outside world. It"s the bane of history teachers at every level. When University of Vermont professor James Loewen asked his senior social-science majors who fought in the Vietnam War, 22 percent answered North and South Korea. Don"t these kids even go to the movies?

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单选题Which of the following parties is NOT British? A. Conservative Party. B. Labour Party. C. Liberal Party. D. Democratic Party.

单选题It was late in the afternoon, and I was putting the final touch on a piece of writing that I was feeling pretty good about. I wanted to save it, but my cursor had frozen. I tried to shut the computer down, and it seized up altogether. Unsure of what else to do, I yanked (用力猛拉) the battery out. Unfortunately, Windows had been in the midst of a delicate and crucial undertaking. The next morning, when I turned my computer back on, it informed me that a file had been corrupted and Windows would not load. Then, it offered to repair itself by using the Windows Setup CD. I opened the special drawer where I keep CDs, but no Windows CD in there. I was forced to call the computer company"s Global Support Centre. My call was answered by a woman in some unnamed, far-off land. I find it annoying to make small talk with someone when I don"t know what continent they"re standing on. Suppose I were to comment on the beautiful weather we"ve been having when there was a monsoon at the other end of the phone? So I got right to the point. "My computer is telling me a file is corrupted and it wants to fix itself, but I don"t have the Windows Setup CD." "So you"re having a problem with your Windows Setup CD." She has apparently been dozing and, having come to just as the sentence ended, was attempting to cover for her inattention. It quickly became clear that the woman was not a computer technician. Her job was to serve as a gatekeeper, a human shield for the technicians. Her sole duty, as far as I could tell, was to raise global stress levels. To make me disappear, the woman gave me the phone number for Windows" creator, Microsoft. This is like giving someone the phone number for, I don"t know, North America. Besides, the CD worked; I just didn"t have it. No matter how many times I repeated my story, we came back to the same place. She was calm and resolutely polite. When my voice hit a certain decibel (分贝), I was passed along, like a hot, irritable potato, to a technician. "You don"t have the Windows Setup CD, ma"am, because you don"t need it," he explained cheerfully. "Windows came preinstalled on your computer!" "But I do need it." "Yes, but you don"t have it." We went on like this for a while. Finally, he offered to walk me through the use of a different CD, one that would erase my entire system. "Of course, you"d lose all your e-mail, your documents, your photos." It was like offering to drop a safe on my head to cure my headache. "You might be able to recover them, but it would be expensive." He sounded delighted. "And it"s not covered by the warranty (产品保证书)!" The safe began to seem like a good idea, provided it was full. I hung up the phone and drove my computer to a small, friendly repair place I"d heard about. A smart, helpful man dug out a Windows CD and told me it wouldn"t be a problem. An hour later, he called to let me know it was ready. I thanked him, and we chatted about the weather, which was the same outside my window as it was outside his.

单选题Text 2 Why does the Western movie especially have such a hold on our imagination? Chiefly, I think, because it offers serious insights into the problem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere in our culture. One of the well-known peculiarities of modern civilized opinion is its refusal to acknowledge the value of violence. This refusal is virtue, but like many virtues it involves a certain willful blindness and it encourages hypocrisy. We train ourselves to be shocked or bored by cultural images of violence, and our very concept of heroism tends to be a passive one: we are less drawn to the brave young men who kill large numbers of our enemies than to the heroic prisoners who endure torture without capitulating. And in the criticism of popular culture, the presence of images of violence is often assumed to be in itself a sufficient ground for condemnation. These attitudes, however, have not reduced the element of violence in our culture but have helped to free it from moral control by letting it take on the aura of "emancipation". The celebration of acts of violence is left more and more to the irresponsible. The gangster movie, with its numerous variations, belongs to a cultural "underground" which glamorizes violence and sets it against all our higher social attitudes. It is more "modern" genre than the Western movie, perhaps even more profound, because it confronts industrial society on its own ground — the city — and because, like much of our advanced art, it gains its effects by a gross insistence on its own narrow logic. But it is anti-social, resting on fantasies of irresponsible freedom. If we are brought finally to acquiesce in the denial of these fantasies, it is only because they have been shown to be dangerous, not because they have given way to higher values of behavior. In war movies, to be sure. it is possible to present violence within a framework of responsibility. But there is the disadvantage that modern war is a co-operative enterprise in which violence is largely impersonal and heroism belongs to the group more than to the individual. The hero of a war movie is most often simply a leader, and his superiority is likely to be expressed in a denial of the heroic: you are not supposed to be brave, you are supposed to get the job done and stay alive (this too, of course, is a kind of heroic posture, but a new and "practical" one). At its best, the war movie may represent a more civilized point of view than the Western, and if it was not continually marred by ideological sentimentality we might hope to find it developing into a higher form of dry. But it cannot supply the values we seek in the Western movies. These values are in the image of a single man who wears a gun on his thigh. The gun tells us that he lives in a world of violence, and even that he "believes in violence". But the drama is one of self restraint: the moment of violence must come in its own time and according to its special laws, or else, it is valueless. He is there to remind us of the possibility of style in an age which has put on itself the burden of pretending that style has no meaning, and, in the midst of our anxieties over the problem of violence, to suggest that even in killing or being killed we are not freed from the necessity of establishing satisfactory models of behavior.

单选题Questions 11 to 13 are based on an interview about paternity leave in Sweden. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.

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 hero 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 coaling 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 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{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} 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 ceils are filled with a jelly-like substance, and contain a series of flat electric plates. One side, the negative side, of each plate, is supplied with very fine nerves, connected with a main nerve coming from 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 horses 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Questions 18 to 20 are based on the following monologue about rainwater. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 18 to 20.

单选题Text 2 The current emergency in Mexico City that has taken over our lives is nothing I could ever have imagined for me or my children. We are living in an environmental crisis, an air pollution emergency of unprecedented severity. What it really means is that just to breathe here is to play a dangerous game with your health. As parents, what terrorizes us most are reports that children are at higher risk because they breathe more times per minute. What more can we do to protect them and ourselves? Our pediatrician's medical recommendation was simple: abandon the city permanently. We are foreigners and we are among the small minority that can afford to leave. We are here because of my husband's work. We are fascinated by Mexico — its history and rich culture. We know that for us, this is a temporary danger. However, we cannot stand for much longer the fear we feel for our boys. We cannot stop them from breathing. But for millions, there is no choice. Their lives, their jobs, their futures depend on being here. Thousands of Mexicans arrive each day in this city, desperate for economic opportunities. Thousands more are born here each day. Entire families work in the streets and practically live there. It is a familiar sight: as parents hawk goods at stoplights, their children play in the grassy highway dividers, breathing exhaust fumes. I feel guilty complaining about my personal situation; we won't be here long enough for our children to tbrm the impression that skies are colored only gray. And yet the government cannot do what it must to end this problem. For any country, especially a developing Third World economy like Mexico' s, the idea of barring from the capital city enough cars, closing enough factories end speeding the necessary billions on public transportation is simply not an option. So when things get bad, as in the current emergency, Mexico takes half measure — prohibiting some more cars from circulating, stopping some factories from producing that even its own officials concede aren't adequate. The word "emergency" implies the unusual. But when daily life itself is an emergency, the concept loses its meaning. It is human nature to try to adapt to that which we cannot change. Or to mislead ourselves into believing we can adapt.

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

单选题Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft chairman without a single earned university degree, is by his success raising new doubts about the worth of the business world''s favorite academic title: the MBA ( Master of Business Administration). The MBA, a 20th-century product, always has borne the mark of lowly commerce and greed on the tree-lined campuses ruled by purer disciplines such as philosophy and literature. But even with the recession apparently cutting into the hiring of business school graduates, about 79,000 people are expected to receive MBAs in 1993. This is nearly 16 times the number of business graduates in 1960, a testimony to the widespread assumption that the MBA is vital for young men and women who want to run companies some day. "If you are going into the corporate world it is still a disadvantage not to have one," said Donald Morrison, Professor of marketing and management science. " But in the last five years or so, when someone says, '' Should I attempt to get an MBA,'' the answer a lot more is: It depends. " The success of Bill Gates and other non-MBAs, such as the late Sam Walton of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. , has helped inspire self-conscious debates on business school campuses over the worth of a business degree and whether management skills can be taught. The Harvard Business Review printed a lively, fictional exchange of letters to dramatize complaints about business degree holders. The article called MBA hires " extremely disappointing" and said " MBAs want to move up too fast, they don''t understand politics and people, and they aren''t able to function as part of a team until their third year. But by then, they''re out looking for other jobs. " The problem, most participants in the debate acknowledge, is that the MBA has acquired an aura of future riches and power far beyond its actual importance and usefulness. Enrollment in business schools exploded in the 1970s and 1980s and created the assumption that no one who pursued a business career could do without one. The growth was fueled by a backlash against the antibusiness values of the 1960s and by the women''s movement. Business people who have hired or worked with MBAs say those with the degrees often know how to analyze systems but are not so skillful at motivating people. " They don''t get a lot of grounding in the people side of the business," said James Shaffer, vice-president and principal of the Towers Perrin management consulting firm.

单选题What was Steve's attitude towards women who wrote love stories?

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Evolutionary theories. The Belgian George Lemaitre proposed the idea that about 20000 million years ago all the matter in the universe—enough, he estimated, to make up a hundred thousand million galaxies—was all concentrated in one small mass, which he called the "primeval atom". This primeval atom exploded for some reasons, sending its matter out in all directions, and as the expansion slowed down, a steady state resulted, at which time the galaxies formed. Something then upset the balance and the universe started expanding again, and this is the state in which the universe is now. There are variations on this theory: it may be that there was no steady state. However, basically, evolutionary theories take it that the universe was formed in one place at one point in time and has been expanding ever since. Will the universe continue to expand? It may be that the universe will continue to expand for ever, but some astronomers believe that the expansion will slow down and finally stop. Thereafter the universe will start to contract until all the matter in it is once again concentrated at one point. Possibly the universe may oscillate for ever in this fashion, expanding to its maximum and then contracting over again. The steady-state theory. Developed at Cambridge by Hoyle, Gold and Bodi, the steady-state theory maintains that the universe as a whole has always looked the same and always will. As the galaxies expand away from each other, new material is formed in some ways between the galaxies and makes up new galaxies to take place of those which have receded. Thus the general distribution of galaxies remains the same. How matter could be formed in this way is hard to see, but no harder than seeing why it should all form in one place at one time. How can we decide which of these theories is closer to the truth? The method is in principle quite simple. Since the very distant galaxies are thousands of millions of light years away, then we are seeing them as they were thousands of millions of years ago. If the evolutionary theory is correct, the galaxies were closer together in the past than they are now, and so distant galaxies ought to appear to be closer together than nearer ones. According to the steady-state theory there should be no difference. The evidence seems to suggest that there is a difference, that the galaxies were closer together than they are now, and so the evolutionary theory is partially confirmed and the steady-state theory—in its original form at least—must be rejected.

单选题 {{I}}Questions 14 - 16 are based on the following conversation. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 - 16.{{/I}}

单选题Questions 14 to 16 are based on a talk about business management. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.

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单选题Unit 5Part A Read the following texts and answer the questions which accompany them by choosing A, B, C or D. Markyour answers on the ANSWER SHEET 1. Text 1 Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics — the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close. As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much hum an labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robo-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy—far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone. But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves — goals that pose a real challenge. "While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error," says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, "we can't yet give a robot enough 'commonsense' to reliably interact with a dynamic world." Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries. What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain's roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented — and human perception far more complicated—than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can't approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don't know quite how we do it.

单选题The government of Britain has for many centuries been shared by the supreme authorities: the Monarch (i.e. the King or Queen), the Lords (i.e. the hereditary nobility) and the Commons (i.e. the ordinary people). The story of its development has been the story of a gradual shifting of supremacy from the first of these authorities to the third in other words a gradual progress towards democracy. Thus the Monarchy today is left without any power at all. This statement may seem surprising in view of the great affection which the British have for Queen Elizabeth, the great ceremonies connected with her, the great state functions over which she presides, the oath of loyalty made to her by Parliament, and the many great decisions made in her name and requiring her authority. It is the Queen who approves the appointment of Ministers and the formation of a Cabinet; it is the Queen who summons Parliament and who introduces the new session with a speech from the Throne in which she summarizes the government's programme; it is the Queen who gives her assent to Bill before they become law, who concludes treaties and declares war, who makes appointments to all offices of State and Church, who dismisses Parliament when the government has been defeated or has reached the end of its term, and who chooses a new Prime Minister. Indeed, she is informed and consulted on every aspect of national life. And yet it remains true that she has no power. For in practice, she acts only on the advice of her Ministers, and must be completely impartial. This is of course not very easy to understand, and you may want to know what would happen if the Queen refused to give her assent to something she disagreed with. But the case would never arise. The Queen never refuses her assent, because she knows this would be unconstitutional. In any case she had no means of enforcing her will. What is then the use of having a queen? Some British people would answer: no use at all. Some think the Monarchy is a useless relic of bygone age, and a tremendous waste of public money too. But these arguments are comparatively weak. Most British people regard the monarchy as a long-established tradition, which, with all its colour and pageantry and with all the feelings of personal respect which it inspires, they would be most unwilling to lose. More than this, the monarch is the only unchangeable symbol of British itself. Politicians come and go according to the elections won or lost, and at any given moment every politician always has many determined opponents among those who do not belong to his own party. But the Monarch is always there, above party quarrels, representing the nation as a whole, and lending dignity and significance to all things done in her name.

单选题Few words are more commonly used in our modern world than the word modern itself. The modernity of manufactured articles, of institutions, of attitudes, of works of art is constantly brought to our attention. We ourselves may well be judged by whether we are modern or not; indeed, many people go to considerable lengths to make quite certain that they will be accepted as modern — modern in their dress, their behaviour, their beliefs. And yet, we may ask, must not earlier generations have felt precisely the same? Surely men throughout history must have recognized themselves as modern. Surely innovators like Julius Caesar, Peter the Great or Oliver Cromwell saw themselves as breaking with the past, as establishing a new order. (Must they not also have shared our awareness of the significance of what is modern?) What is modern is distinct from what belongs to the past and men in earlier times must have experienced this sense of distinctiveness. Men cannot escape, and never have been able to escape, from an awareness of change. But reflection will tell us that our awareness of change, our sense of distinctiveness, is very different from that of our distant ancestors. Change for us is more, much more, than the change brought about by the passing of time, by important events or by the actions of outstanding individuals or groups of people. We make use of change and are ourselves a part of a process of change. Change for us has become modernization and modernization implies both direction and consciousness. Change is something we seek, something that has no end. This consciousness of change and this desire to direct change derives from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. The term revolution is usually applied to an historical event, an event we can place in time. We can normally speak of a time before the revolution and a time after the revolution. But the Industrial Revolution, although it had a beginning, has never come to an end. It is a process which cannot stop. It is a process which effects more and more people in more and more ways. We may argue that it is a process directed by men and this would be true if we look at the details of the process. But the whole process is, as yet, beyond control. We can decide the direction of modernization to some extent but we cannot decide to halt it. This has led to a disturbing situation. What we boast of as modern or up-to-date today, will be old-fashioned or out-of-date tomorrow. The noisy insistence that something is modern often conceals fear of the knowledge that it will inevitably soon be superseded. Again, the very fact that modernization has one direction only and involves every member of society permits only two attitudes: acceptance or rejection. The desire to change or modify the world we live in implies acceptance, since the world is a world of change. Rejection of modernization may, therefore, lead to a sense of the world as unreal and meaningless, and this, in turn, to a breakdown, either individual or social.