单选题The campaign staged by both BMW and Renault are to promote

单选题Questions 17 to 20 are based on the talk about George Orwell. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.

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. According to the American Academy of Dermatology, an estimated 10 to 50 million people in this country have an allergic reaction to poison ivy each year. Poison ivy is often very difficult to spot. It closely resembles several other common garden plants, and can also blend in with other plants and weeds. But if you come into contact with it, you'll soon know by the itchy, blistery rash that forms on your skin. Poison ivy is a red, itchy rash caused by the plant that bears its name. Many people get it when they are hiking or working in their garden and accidentally come into direct contact with the plant's leaves, roots, or stems. The poison ivy rash often looks like red lines, and sometimes it forms blisters. 66.______ About 85 percent of people are allergic to the urushiol in poison ivy, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. Only a tiny amount of this chemical—1 billionth of a gram—is enough to cause a rash in many people. Some people may boast that they've been exposed to poison ivy many times and have never gotten the rash, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not allergic. Sometimes the allergy doesn't emerge until you've been ex- posed several times, and some people develop a rash after their very first exposure. It may take up to ten days for the rash to emerge the first time. 67.______ Here are some other ways to identify the poison ivy plant. It generally grows in a cluster of low, weed-like plants or a woody vine which can climb trees or fences. It is most often found in moist areas, such as riverbanks, woods, and pastures. The edges of the leaves are generally smooth or have tiny "teeth". Their color changes based on the season—reddish in the spring; green in the summer; and yellow, orange, or red in the fall. Its berries are typically white. 68.______ The body's immune system is normally in the business of protecting us from bacteria, viruses, and their foreign invaders that can make us sick. But when urushiol from the poison ivy plant touches the skin, it instigates an immune response, called dermatitis, to what would otherwise be a harmless substance. Hay fever is another example of this type of response; in the case of hay fever, the immune system overreacts to pollen, or another plant-produced substance. 69.______ The allergic reaction to poison ivy is known as delayed hypersensitivity. Unlike immediate hypersensitivity, which causes an allergic reaction within minutes of exposure to an antigen, delayed hypersensitivity reactions don't emerge for several hours or even days after the exposure. 70.______ In the places where your skin has come into contact with poison ivy leaves or urushiol, within one to two days you'll develop a rash, which will usually itch, redden, bum, swell, and form blisters. The rash should go away within a week, but it can last longer. The severity of the reaction often has to do with how much urushiol you've touched. The rash may appear sooner in some parts of the body than in others, but it doesn't spread—the urushiol simply absorbs into the skin at different rates in different parts of the body. Thicker skin such as the skin on the on soles of your feet, is harder to penetrate than thinner skin on your arms and legs. A. Because urushiol is found in all parts of the poison ivy plant—the leaves, stems, and roots—it's best to a- void the plant entirely to prevent a rash. The trouble is, poison ivy grows almost everywhere in the United States (with the exception of the Southwest, Alaska, and Hawaii), so geography won't help you. The general rote to identify poison ivy, "leaflets three, let it be," doesn't always apply. Poison ivy usually does grow in groups of three leaves, with a longer middle leaf—bnt it can also grow with up to nine leaves in a group. B. Most people don't have a reaction the first time they touch poison ivy, but develop an allergic reaction after repeated exposure. Everyone has a different sensitivity, and therefore a slightly different reaction, to poison ivy. Sensitivity usually decreases with age and with repeat exposures to the plant. C. Here's how the poison ivy response occurs. Urushiol makes its way down through the skin, where it is metabolized, or broken down. Immune cells called T lymphocytes (or T-cells) recognize the urushiol derivatives as a foreign substance, or antigen. They send out inflammatory signals called cytokines, which bring in white blood cells. Under orders from the cytokines, these white blood cells turn into macrophages. The macrophages eat foreign substances, but in doing so they also damage normal tissue, resulting in the skin inflammation that occurs with poison ivy. D. Poison ivy's cousins, poison oak and poison sumac, each have their own unique appearance. Poison oak grows as a shrub (one to six feet tall). It is typically found along the West Coast and in the South, in dry areas such fields, woodlands, and thickets. Like poison ivy, the leaves of poison oak are usually clustered in groups of three. They tend to be thick, green, and hairy on both sides. Poison sumac mainly grows in moist, swampy areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and along the Mississippi River. It is a woody shrub made up of stems with rows of seven to thirteen smooth-edged leaflets. E. The culprit behind the rash is a chemical in the sap of poison ivy plants called umshiol. Its name comes from the Japanese word "urushi," meaning lacquer. Urushiol is the same substance that triggers an allergic reaction when people touch poison oak and poison sumac plants. Poison ivy, Eastern poison oak, Western poi- son oak, and poison sumac are all members of the same family—Anacardiaceae. F. Call your doctor if you experience these more serious reactions: ·Pus around the rash (which could indicate an infection). ·A rash around your mouth, eyes, or genital area. ·A fever above 100 degrees. ·A rash that does not heal after a week.

单选题It is interesting to reflect for a moment upon the differences in the areas of moral feeling and standards in the peoples of Japan and the United States. Americans divide these areas somewhat rigidly into spirit and flesh, the two being in opposition in the life of a human being. Ideally spirit should prevail but all too often it is the flesh that does prevail. The Japanese make no such division, at least between one as good and the other as evil. They believe that a person has two souls, each necessary. One is the "gentle" soul, the other is the "rough" soul. Sometimes the person uses his gentle soul. Sometimes he must use his rough soul. He does not favor his gentle soul, neither does he fight his rough soul. Human nature in itself is good, Japanese philosophers insist, and a human being does not need to fight any part of himself. He has only to learn how to use each soul properly at the appropriate times. Virtue for the Japanese consists in fulfilling one's obligations to others. Happy endings, either in life or in fiction, are neither necessary nor expected, since the fulfillment of duty provides the satisfying end, whatever the tragedy it inflicts. And duty includes a person's obligations to those who have conferred benefits upon him and to himself as an individual of honor. He develops through this double sense of duty a self discipline which is at once permissive and rigid, depending upon the area in which it is functioning. The process of acquiring this self-discipline begins in childhood. Indeed, one may say it begins at birth. Early is the Japanese child given his own identity! If I were to define in a word the attitude of the Japanese toward their children I would put it in one succinct word- "respect". Love? Yes, abundance of love, warmly expressed from the moment he is put to his mother's breast. For mother and child this nursing of her child is important psychologically. Rewards are frequent, a bit of candy bestowed at the right moment, an inexpensive toy. As the time comes to enter school, however, discipline becomes firmer. To bring shame to the family is the greatest shame for the child. What is the secret of the Japanese teaching of self-discipline? It lies, I think, in the fact that the aim or all teaching is the establishment of habit. Rules are repeated over, and continually practiced until obedience becomes instinctive. This repetition is enhanced by the expectation of the elders. They expect a child to obey and to learn through obedience. The demand is gentle at first and tempered to the child's tender age. It is no less gentle as time goes on. but certainly it is increasingly inexorable. Now, far away from that warm Japanese home, I reflect upon what 1 learned there. What, I wonder, will take the place of the web of love and discipline which for so many centuries has surrounded the life and thinking of the people of Japan?

单选题 A UCSF study has revealed new information about how the brain directs the body to make movements. The key factor is "noise" in the brain's signaling, and it helps explain why all movement is not carried out with the same level of precision. Understanding where noise arises in the brain has implications for advancing research in neuromotor control and in developing therapies for disorders where control is impaired, such as Parkinson's disease. The new study was developed "to understand the brain machinery behind such common movements as typing, walking through a doorway or just pointing at an object," says Stephen Lisberger, PhD, senior study investigator who is director of the W.M. Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. Study co-investigators are Leslie C. Osborne, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, and William Bialek, PhD, professor of physics at Princeton University. The study findings, reported in the September 15 issue of the journal Nature; are part of ongoing research by Lisberger and colleagues on the neural mechanisms that allow the brain to learn and maintain skills and behavior. These basic functions are carried out through the coordination of different nerve cells within the brain's neural circuits. "To make a movement, the brain takes the electrical activity of many neurons and combines them to make muscle contractions," Lisberger explains. "But the movements aren't always perfect. So we asked, what gets in the way?" The answer, he says, is "noise", which is defined as the difference between what is actually occurring and what the brain perceives. He offers making a foul shot in basketball as an example. If there were no noise in the neuromotor system, a player would be able to perform the same motion over and over and never miss a shot. "Understanding how noise is reduced to very precise commands helps us understand how those commands are created," says Lisberger, who also is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a UCSF professor of physiology. In the study, the research team focused on a movement that all primates are very skilled at: an eye movement known as "smooth pursuit" that allows the eyes to track a moving target. In a series of exercises with monkeys in which the animals would track visual targets, the researchers measured neural activity and smooth pursuit eye movements. From this data, the team analyzed the difference between how accurately the animals actually tracked a moving object and how accurately the brain perceived the trajectory. Findings showed that both the smooth pursuit system and the brain's perceptual system were nearly equal. "This teaches us that these very different neural processes are limited to the same degree by the same noise sources," says Lisberger. "And it shows that both processes are very good at reducing noise." He concludes, "Because the brain is noisy, our motor systems don't always do what it tells us to. Making precise movements in the face of this noise is a challenge."

单选题 Questions 11 to 13 are based on a conversation between two college students about sharing a flat. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.

单选题Whatisthewoman'stoneofvoicewhenshefirstseestheman?A.Frustrated.B.Relieved.C.Sarcastic.D.Apologetic.

单选题Joseph Machlis says that the blues is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we know. In other words, it is a blending of both traditions. Something special and entirely different from either of its parent traditions. (Although Alan Lomax cites some examples of very similar songs having been found in Northwest Africa, particularly among the Wolof and Watusi) The word 'blue' has been associated with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington Irving is credited with coining the term' the blues,' as it is now defined, in 1807. The earlier (almost entirely Negro) history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s. When African and European music first began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound despair... They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South," for it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death. Alan Lore, ax states that the blues tradition was considered to be a masculine discipline (although some of the first blues songs heard by whites were sung by 'lady' blues singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith) and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations. The prison road crews and work gangs where were many bluesmen found their songs, and where many other blacks simply became familiar with the same songs. Following the Civil War (according to Rolling Stone), the blues arose as "a distillate of the African music brought over by slaves. Field hollers, ballads, church music and rhythmic dance tunes called jump-ups evolved into a music for a singer who would engage in call-and-response with his guitar. He would sing a line, and the guitar would answer it." By the 1890s the blues were sung in many of the rural areas of the South. And by 1910, the word 'blues' as applied to the musical tradition was in fairly common use. Some 'bluesologists' claim (rather dubiously) that the first blues song that was ever written down was 'Dallas Blues,' published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. The blues form was first popularized about 1911-14 by the black composer W.C. Handy (1873-1958). However, the poetic and musical form of the blues first crystallized around 1910 and gained popularity through the publication of Handy's "Memphis Blues" (1912) and "St. Louis Blues" (1914). Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mantle Smith recorded the first vocal blues song, 'Crazy Blues' in 1920. Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the "initial popularity of jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place, and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as the mainstream of pop music." American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the U.S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers.

单选题 Questions 17 to 20 are based on a dialogue between two colleagues in the office one night. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.

单选题{{I}} Questions 15 to 17 are based on a talk on student housing. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 15 to 17.{{/I}}

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单选题In the past two years I've phoned, e-mailed and dined with three potential "ideal husbands. " (This is according to the aunts or cousins who talk up the suitors to my parents. Marriage brokering is a favorite pastime for my extended family. ) The investment banker was my first blind date. The timing couldn't have been worse. He'd made his mark and was searching for a full-fledged adult companion, not a recent journalism-school graduate who spent most of lunch whining about being unemployed. After that came drinks with the San Francisco-based attorney. He rattled on about himself for an hour and then we said polite goodbyes. It was a superficial meeting, as initial conversations usually are. Two days later he sent me a long e-mail explaining that he wasn't ready for a serious commitment--which was a shame because I'd already mailed the invitations, set up the bridal registry and commissioned the cake. Finally, there was the multimedia artist raised in London. We had been e-mailing each other for a few months and, for the most part, it was a pleasant exchange. When we met in person, he complimented my apartment, but said he would like it better if I weren't in it (I think he was joking). He made me see "Deep Impact. " Enough said. Obviously, none of these gentlemen wound up being "the one. " And compared with the agony that can follow a breakup after just a few months of dating, I came out relatively unscathed. However, just because there wasn't an emotional investment, the rejection didn't smart any less. In my most dire moments I consider surrendering my marital future to the scientists at the University of Hawaii who successfully cloned a couple of mice. If I could take elements of my three suitors and fuse them together, maybe I would have the perfect man. I could just relax while genetic engineering caught up with my needs. Of course, I don't see the anxious aunts and cousins waiting it out with me. In fact, my father seems keen on sending me on an extended holiday to India. I can just picture myself rolling out of Calcutta customs, bleary eyed and jet-lagged, to be greeted by a line of eligible young men holding up little cards with their respective heights printed on them, well-intentioned mothers hovering close at hand.

单选题Not too many decades ago it seemed "obvious" both to the general public and to sociologists that modem society has changed people"s natural relations, loosened their responsibilities to kin and neighbors, and substituted in their place superficial relationships with passing acquaintances. However, in recent years a growing body of research has revealed that the "obvious" is not true. It seems that if you are a city resident, you typically know a smaller proportion of your neighbors than you do if you are a resident of a smaller community. But, for the most part, this fact has few significant consequences. It does not necessarily follow that if you know few of your neighbors you will know no one else. Even in very large cities, people maintain close social ties within small, private social worlds. Indeed, the number and quality of meaningful relationships do not differ between more and less urban people. Small-town residents are more involved with kin than are big-city residents. Yet city dwellers compensate by developing friendships with people who share similar interests and activities. Urbanism may produce a different style of life, but the quality of life does not differ between town and city. Nor are residents of large communities any likelier to display psychological symptoms of stress or alienation, a feeling of not belonging, than are residents of smaller communities. However, city dwellers do worry more about crime, and this leads them to a distrust of strangers. These findings do not imply that urbanism makes little or no difference. If neighbors are strangers to one another, they are less likely to sweep the sidewalk of an elderly couple living next door or keep an eye out for young trouble makers. Moreover, as Wirth suggested, there may be a link between a community"s population size and its social heterogeneity. For instance, sociologists have found much evidence that the size of a community is associated with bad behavior including gambling, drugs, etc. Large-city urbanites are, also more likely than their small-town counterparts to have a cosmopolitan outlook, to display less responsibility to traditional kinship roles, to vote for leftist political candidates, and to be tolerant of nontraditional religious groups, unpopular political groups, and so-called undesirables. Everything considered, heterogeneity and unusual behavior seem to be outcomes of large population size.

单选题Early in the film "A Beautiful Mind", the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go, an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually was awarded a Nobel Prize. In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at that time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player. The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid's intersections. The object is to acquire and defend territory by surrounding it with stones. Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting the ways the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and perhaps most intriguingly, intuition. Along with intuition, pattern recognition is a large part of the game. While computers are good at crunching numbers, people are naturally good at matching patterns. Humans can recognize an acquaintance at a glance, even from the back. Daniel Bump, a mathematics professor at Stanford, works on a program called GNU Go in his spare time. "You can very quickly look at a chess game and see if there's some major issue," he said. But to make a decision in Go, he said, players must learn to combine their pattern-matching abilities with the logic and knowledge they have accrued in years of playing. "Part of the challenge has to do with processing speed. The typical chess program can evaluate about 300,000 positions in a second, and Deep Blue was able to evaluate some 200 million positions in a second. By mid-game, most Go programs can evaluate only a couple of dozen positions each second," said Anders Kierulf, who wrote a program called SmartGo. In the course of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would need about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three Seconds, said Michael Reiss, a computer scientist in London. But the obstacles go deeper than processing power. Not only do Go programs have trouble evaluating positions quickly; they have trouble evaluating them correctly. Nonetheless, the allure of computer Go increases as the difficulties it poses encourage programmers to advance basic work in artificial intelligence. For that reason, Fotland said, "writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program. /

单选题As Gilbert White, Darwin, and others observed long ago, all species appear to have the innate capacity to increase their numbers from generation to generation. The task for ecologists is to untangle the environmental and biological factors that hold this intrinsic capacity for population growth in check over the long run. The great variety of dynamic behaviors exhibited by different population makes this task more difficult; some populations remain roughly constant from year to year; others exhibit regular cycles of abundance and scarcity; still others vary wildly, with outbreaks and crashes that are in some cases plainly correlated with the weather, and in other cases not. To impose some order on this kaleidoscope of patterns, one school of thought proposes dividing populations into two groups. These ecologists posit that the relatively steady populations have density-dependent growth parameters; that is, rates of birth, death, and migration which depend strongly on population density. The highly varying populations have density-independent growth parameters, with vital rates buffeted by environmental events; these rates fluctuate in a way that is wholly independent of population density. This dichotomy has its uses, but it can cause problems if taken too literally. For one thing, no population can be driven entirely by density-independent factors all the time. No matter how severely or unpredictably birth, death, and migration rates may be fluctuating around their long-term averages, if there were no density-dependent effects, the population would, in the long run, either increase or decrease without bound (barring a miracle by which gains and losses canceled exactly). Put another way, it may be that on average 99 percent of all deaths in a population arise from density-independent causes, and only one percent from factors varying with density. The factors making up the one percent may seem unimportant, and their cause may be correspondingly hard to determine. Yet, whether recognized or not, they will usually determine the long-term average population density. In order to understand the nature of the ecologist's investigation, we may think of the density-dependent effects on growth parameters as the signal ecologists are trying to isolate and interpret, one that tends to make the population increase from relatively low values or decrease from relatively high ones, while the density-independent effects act to produce noise in the population dynamics. For populations that remain relatively constant, or that oscillate around repeated cycles, the signal can be fairly easily characterized and its effects described, even though the causative biological mechanism may remain unknown. For irregularly fluctuating populations, we are likely to have too few observations to have any hope of extracting the signal from the overwhelming noise. But it now seems clear that all populations are regulated by a mixture of density-dependent and density-independent effects in varying proportions.

单选题Whichofthefollowingstatementsistrueaccordingtothespeaker?A.Mostpeoplehavedictionariesbutdon'tusethemfrequently.B.Mostpeopledon'thavedictionariesbutneedthemveryoften.C.Mostpeoplehavedictionariesandusethemveryoften.D.Mostpeopledon'thavedictionariesandseldomneedthem.

单选题Throughout the 20th century, historians have argued about the reasons for the unprecedented drive for colonial expansion that seized Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States, in the last decades of the 19th century. The majority of those engaged in this often heated debates have tended to join one of two camps: those who favor a political explanation for the outburst of territorial enlargement, and those who argue that it was fundamentally economic concerns when deciding to intervene in disputes or to involve in Africa, Asia, or the South Pacific. The British preoccupation with protection strategic overseas naval stations, such as those in Malaya and in South Africa, for example, was linked to an underlying perception of growing threat to their Indian Empire. That empire was in turn more than just their "garrison in the east" and largest colonial possession. It was a major source of raw materials for British industries and a key outlet for both British manufactured good and British overseas investment. Thus, political and economic motives were often impossible to separate; doing so unnecessarily oversimplifies and distorts our understanding of the forces behind the haste for empire in the late 19th century. It would also be a mistake to see a complete break between the pattern of European colonial expansion before and after 1870. Though a good deal more territory was added per year after that date, there were numerous colonial wars and additions to both the British and French empires all through the middle decades of the 19th century. One of the key differences between the two periods was that before 1870, Britain had only a weak France with which to compete in the outside world. This meant that the British were less likely than at the end of the century to be pushed into full-scale invasions and annexations because they feared that another European power was about to seize potentially valuable colonies. It also allowed the British to rely heavily on threats and gunboat raids rather than outright conquest to bring African kings or Asian Emperors into line. With its "white" settler colonies (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and India, plus enclaves in Africa and Southeast Asia, the British already had all the empire they could handle. Most British politicians were cautious about or firmly opposed to adding more colonies. The British were watchful to French advance in various parts of the globe, which were usually made to restore France's great-power standing following setbacks in Europe. But the French were far too weak economically and too politically divided to contest Britain's naval mastery or its standing as the greatest colonial power.

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单选题The case involving two brother killers demonstrates that______.

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