单选题______ is known to the world, Mark Twain is great American writer.

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

单选题Why is transition difficult?

单选题Questions 11 ～ 13 are based on the following talk. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 ～ 13.

单选题According to the passage, the maximum intensity of sound coming from commercials______.

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单选题Whatisthebraincomparedto?A．Anautomobileengine.B．Atelephoneexchange.C．Pump.D．Mind.

单选题Pop stars today enjoy a style of living which was once the prerogative only of Royalty. Wherever they go, people turn out in their thousands to greet them. The crowds go wild trying to catch a brief glimpse of their smiling, colorfully dressed idols. The stars are transported in their chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces, private helicopters or executive aero-planes. They are surrounded by a permanent entourage of managers, press agents and bodyguards. Photographs of them appear regularly in the press and all their comings and goings are reported, for, like Royalty, pop stars are news. If they enjoy many of the privileges of Royalty, they certainly share many of the inconveniences as well. It is dangerous for them to make unscheduled appearances in public. They must be constantly shielded from the adoring crowds which idolize them. They are no longer private individuals, but public property. The financial rewards they receive for this sacrifice cannot be calculated, for their rates of pay are astronomical. And why not? Society has always rewarded its top entertainers lavishly. The great days of Hollywood have become legendary, famous stars enjoyed fame, wealth and adulation on an unprecedented scale. By today's standards, the excesses of Hollywood do not seem quite so spectacular. A single gramophone record nowadays may earn much more in royalties than the films of the past ever did. The competition for the title "Top of the Pops" is fierce, but the rewards are truly colossal. It is only right that the stars should be paid in this way. Don't the top men in industry earn enormous salaries for the services they perform to their companies and their countries? Pop stars earn vast sums in foreign currency—often more than large industrial concerns— and the taxman can only be grateful for their massive annual contributions to the exchequer. So who would grudge them their rewards? It's all very well for people in humdrum jobs to moan about the successes and rewards of others. People who make envious remarks should remember that the most famous stars represent only the tip of the iceberg. For every famous star, there are hundreds of others struggling to earn a living. A man working in a steady job and looking forward to a pension at the end of it has no right to expect very high rewards. He has chosen security and peace of mind, so there will always be a limit to what he can earn. But a man who attempts to become a star is taking enormous risks. He knows at the outset that only a handful of competitors ever get to the very top. He knows that years of concentrated effort may be rewarded with complete failure. But he knows, too, that the rewards for success are very high indeed, they are the recompense for the huge risks involved and if he achieves them, he has certainly earned them. That's the essence of private enterprise.

单选题Which movie is not awarded the Oscar's best movie? A. American Beauty B. A Beautiful Mind C. Shakespeare in Love D. Secret Window

单选题It can be inferred from the passage that which of the following materials would NOT be used to build a proscenium arch?

单选题A new variety of sugar cane, bred from crosses of ordinary cultivated strains with a wild type found in Argentina, could become an important source of energy as well as sugar. Two conditions need to be fulfilled to make it worthwhile to cultivate an agricultural crop for energy. The crop must be easy to harvest and process, and it must be high-yielding. On both these counts, sugar cane is ideal: the technology for harvesting and milling has been thoroughly tested over the years, and sugar cane is one of the most productive plants ever recorded. Professor Mike Giamalva and his colleagues at Louisiana State University have now produced a plant that is super-productive. Their new variety grows to 3.6 metres high. On experimental plots, it gives yields of 253 tons per hectare -equal to the highest yield of any plant recorded. But even this record has been exceeded. On good soil, yields may reach 321 tons per hectare. Another advantage of Giamalva's new strain of sugar cane is its high fibre content. Traditionally, researchers have selected strains that produce large amounts of juice rich in sugar, and low quantities of fibre. The fibre is either discarded, or sometimes burnt as fuel. The new sugar cane gives exceptional quantities of fibre for only modest amounts of juice. When it comes from the mill, the bagasse has about 70 per cent of the heat content of wood, or 30-40 per cent of that of coal. Burning bagasse to provide energy is not a new idea. Many sugar factories throughout the world are now self-sufficient in energy, while some, for example, in Mauritius, Hawaii and South Africa, "export" electricity to the national grid. Mauritius currently gets around 10 per cent of its electricity from sugar factories. However, in Louisiana local farmers are unwilling to grow the cane until they have a guaranteed market. Yet industrialists will not invest in the new fuel until they have a constant supply. And only local factories may be able to exploit cane because, being bulky, it is costly to transport. One way of overcoming this problem would be to dry the fibrous residue and compact it. Work on compacting fibrous residue is now under way in several research centres. Whether compacting will pay its way will depend on the local situation and the cost of alternative energy supplies. A study carried out by Fay Baguant from the University of Mauritius showed that electricity could be produced there from fibrous residue about twice as cheaply as from oil or coalfired stations. The new variety can be grown with ordinary sugar cane or with other crops to provide energy for processing. It can be compressed and burned as a substitute for charcoal. Or it can be incorporated into paper, cardboard and fibreboard. Brazil, with its fleet of cars running almost entirely on alcohol fuel extracted from sugar cane, already has shown that the plant has the potential to alter radically a country's agricultural sector.

单选题One of the most alarming things about the crisis in the global financial system is that the warning signs have been out there for some time, yet no one heeded them. Exactly 10 years ago, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) failed to convince investors that it could repay its debts, thereby bringing the world to the brink of a similar "liquidity crisis" to the one we now see. Disaster was averted then only because regulators managed to put together a multi-billion-dollar bailout package. LTCM"s collapse was particularly notable because its founders had set great store by their use of statistical models designed to keep tabs on the risks inherent in their investments. Its fall should have been a wake-up call to banks and their regulatory supervisors that the models were not working as well as hoped—in particular that they were ignoring the risks of extreme events and the connections that send such events reverberating around the financial system. Instead, they carried on using them. Now that disaster has struck again, some financial risk modelers—the "quants" who have wielded so much influence over modern banking—are saying they know where the gaps in their knowledge are and are promising to fill them. Should we trust them? Their track record does not inspire confidence. Statistical models have proved almost useless at predicting the killer risks for individual banks, and worse than useless when it comes to risks to the financial system as a whole. The models encouraged bankers to think they were playing a high-stakes card game, when what they were actually doing was more akin to lining up a row of dominoes. How could so many smart people have gotten it so wrong? One reason is that theft faith in their model"s predictive power led them to ignore what was happening in the real world. Finance offers enormous scope for dissembling: almost any failure can be explained away by a judicious choice of language and data. When investors do not behave like the self-interested homo economics that economists suppose them to be, they are described as being "irrationally exuberant" or blinded by panic. An alternative view—that investors are reacting logically in the face of uncertainty—is rarely considered. Similarly, extreme events are described as happening only "once in a century"—even though there is insufficient data on which to base such an assessment. The quants" models might successfully predict the movement of markets most of the time, but the bankers who rely on them have failed to realize that the occasions on which the markets deviate from normality are much more important than those when they comply. The events of the past year have driven this home in a spectacular fashion: by some estimates, the banking industry has lost more money in the current crisis than it has made in its entire history.

单选题What is a possible negative effect of olestra according to some critics?

单选题{{I}} Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following talk on world's population booming. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.{{/I}}

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单选题The writer regards his friends' farewell to him as ______.

单选题Questions 14～16 are based on the following talk. You now have 15 seconds to rend Questions 14～16.

单选题Text 1 Hostility to Gypsies has existed almost from the time they first appeared in Europe in the 14th century. The origins of the Gypsies, with little written history, were shrouded in mystery. What is known now from clues in the various dialects of their language, Romany, is that they came from northern India to the Middle East a thousand years ago, working as minstrels and mercenaries, metal-smiths and servants. Europeans misnamed them Egyptians, soon shortened to Gypsies. A clan system, based mostly on their traditional crafts and geography, has made them a deeply fragmented and fractious people, only really unifying in the face of enmity from non-Gypsies, whom they call gadje. Today many Gypsy activists prefer to be called Roma, which comes from the Romany word for "man". But on my travels among them most still referred to themselves as Gypsies. In Europe their persecution by the gadje began quickly, with the church seeing heresy in their fortune-telling and the state seeing anti-social behavior in their nomadism. At various times they have been forbidden to wear their distinctive bright clothes, to speak their own language, to travel, to marry one another, or to ply their traditional crafts. In some countries they were reduced to slavery and it wasn't until the mid-1800s that Gypsy slaves were freed in Romania. In more recent times the Gypsies were caught up in Nazi ethnic hysteria, and perhaps half a million perished in the Holocaust. Their horses have been shot and the wheels removed from their wagons, their names have been changed, their women have been sterilized, and their children have been forcibly given for adoption to non-Gypsy families. But the Gypsies have confounded predictions of their disappearance as a distinct ethnic group and their numbers have burgeoned. Today there are an estimated 8 to 12 million Gypsies scattered across Europe, making them the continent's largest minority. The exact number is hard to pin down. Gypsies have regularly been undercounted, both by regimes anxious to downplay their profile and by Gypsies themselves, seeking to avoid bureaucracies. Attempting to remedy past inequities, activist groups may overcount. Hundreds of thousands more have emigrated to the Americas and elsewhere. With very few exceptions Gypsies have expressed no great desire for a country to call their own—unlike the Jews, to whom the Gypsy experience is often compared. "Romanestan" said Ronald Lee, the Canadian Gypsy writer, "is where my two feet stand./

单选题The Internet, E-commerce and globalization are making a new economic era possible. In the future, capitalist markets will largely be replaced by a new kind of economic system based on networked relationships, contractual arrangements and access rights. Has the quality of our lives at work, at home and in our communities increased in direct proportion to all the new Internet and business-to-business Internet services being introduced into our lives? I have asked this question of hundreds of CEOS and corporate executives in Europe and the United States. Surprisingly, virtually everyone has said, "No, quite contrary. " The very people responsible for ushering in what some have called a "technological renaissance" say they are working longer hours, feel more stressed, are more impatient, and are even less civil in their dealings with colleagues and friends—not to mention strangers. And what's more revealing, they place much of the blame on the very same technologies they are so aggressively championing. The techno gurus (领袖) promised us that access would make life more convenient and give us more time. Instead, the very technological wonders that were supposed to liberate us have begun to enslave us in a web of connections from which there seems to be no easy escape. If an earlier generation was preoccupied with the quest to enclose a vast geographic frontier, the generation to come, it seems, is more caught up in the colonization of time. Every spare moment of our time is being filled with some form of commercial connection, making time itself the most scarce of all resources. Our e-mail, voice mail and cell phones, our 24-hour Interact news and entertainment all seize for our attention. And while we have created every kind of labor-and-time-saving device to service our needs, we are beginning to feel like we have less time available to us than any other humans in history. That is because the great proliferation of labor-and-time-saving services only increases the diversity, pace and flow of common day activity around us. For example, e-mail is a great convenience. However, we now find ourselves spending much of our day frantically responding to each other's electronic messages. The cell phone is a great time-saver, except now we are always potentially in reach of someone else who wants our attention. Social conservatives talk about the decline in civility and blame it on the loss of a moral compass and religious values. Has anyone bothered to ask whether the hyper speed culture is making all of us less patient and less willing to listen and defer, consider and reflect? Maybe we need to ask what kinds of connections really count and what types of access really matter in the e-economy era. If this new technology revolution is only about hyper efficiency, then we risk losing something even precious than time—our sense of what it means to be a caring human being.

单选题{{I}}Questions 11 - 13 are based on the following conversation. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions11-13{{/I}}