单选题Vibrations in the ground are a poorly understood but probably widespread means of communication between animals. It seems unlikely that these animals could have detected seismic "pre-shocks" that were missed by the sensitive vibration-detecting equipment that clutters the world's earthquake laboratories. But it is possible. And the fact that many animal species behave strangely before other natural events such as storms, and that they have the ability to detect others of their species at distances which the familiar human senses could not manage, is well established. Such observations have led some to suggest that these animals have a kind of extra-sensory perception. What is more likely, though, is that they have an extra sense—a form of perception that people lack. The best guess is that they can feel and understand vibrations that are transmitted through the ground. Almost all the research done into animal signalling has been on sight, hearing and smell, because these are senses that people possess. Humans have no sense organs designed specifically to detect terrestrial vibrations. But, according to researchers who have been meeting in Chicago at a symposium of the society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, this anthropocentric approach has meant that interactions via vibrations of the ground (a means of communication known as seismic signalling) have been almost entirely over-looked. These researchers believe that such signals are far more common than biologists had realized—and that they could explain a lot of otherwise inexplicable features of animal behaviour. Until recently, the only large mammal known to produce seismic signals was the elephant seal, a species whose notoriously aggressive bulls slug it out on beaches around the world for possession of harems of females. But Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell of Stanford University, who is one of the speakers at the symposium, suspects that a number of large terrestrial mammals, including rhinos, lions and elephants also use vibration as a means of communication. At any rate they produce loud noises that are transmitted through both the ground and the air—and that can travel farther in the first than in the second. Elephants, according to Dr. O'Connell-Rodwell, can transmit signals through the ground this way for distances of as much as 50km when they trumpet, make mock charges or stomp their feet. A seismic sense could help to explain certain types of elephant behaviour. One is an apparent ability to detect thunderstorms well beyond the range that the sound of a storm can carry. Another is the foot-lifting that many elephants display prior to the arrival of another herd. Rather than scanning the horizon with their ears, elephants tend to freeze their posture and raise and lower a single foot. This probably helps them to work out from which direction the vibrations are travelling—rather as a person might stick a finger first in one ear and then in the other to work out the direction that a sound is coming from. In the past decade, many insects, spiders, scorpions, amphibians, reptiles and rodents, as well as large mammals, have been shown to use vibrations for purposes as diverse as territorial defense, mate location and prey detection. Lions, for example, have vibration detectors in their paws and probably use them in the same way as scorpions use their vibration detectors—to locate meals. Dr. Hill herself spent years trying to work out how prairie mole crickets, a highly territorial species of burrowing insect, manage to space themselves out underground. After many failed attempts to provoke a reaction by playing recordings of cricket song to them, she realized that they were actually more interested in her own footfalls than in the airborne music of their fellow crickets. This suggests that it is the seismic component of the song that the insects are picking up and using to distribute themselves. Whether any of this really has implications for such things as earthquake prediction is, of course, highly speculative. But it is a salutary reminder that the limitations of human senses can cause even competent scientists to overlook obvious lines of enquiry. Absence of evidence, it should always be remembered, is not evidence of absence.

单选题Which of the following is not true？

单选题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 Painting your house is like adding something to a huge communal picture in which the rest of the painting is done either by nature or by other people. The picture is not static; it changes as we move about, with the time of day, with the seasons, with new planting, new buildings and with alterations to old ones. Any individual house is just a fragment of this picture, nevertheless it has the power to make or mark the overall scene. In the past people used their creative talents in painting their homes, with great imagination and in varied but always subtly blending colors. The last vestiges of this great tradition can still be seen in the towns of the extreme west of Ireland. It has never been recognized as an art form, partly because of the physical difficulty of hanging a street in a gallery and partly because it is always changing, as paint fades and is renewed. Also it is a communal art which cannot be identified with any person, except in those many cases where great artists of the past found inspiration in ordinary street scenes and recorded them in paint. Following the principles of decoration that were so successful in the past, you should first take a long look at the house and its surroundings and consider possible limitations. The first concerns the amount of color and intensity in the daylight in Britain. Colors that look perfectly in keeping with the sunny, clear skies of the Mediterranean would look too harsh in the grayer light of the north. Since bright light is uncomfortable for the eyes, colors must be strong in order to be seen clearly. Viewed in a dimmer light they appear too bright. It is easy to see this if you look at a brick house while the sun is alternately shining and then going behind a cloud. The brick work colors look much more intense when the sun is hidden. The second limitation is the colors of the surroundings: the colors which go best with Cotswold stone and a rolling green countryside will be different from those that look best by the sea or in a red--brick/ blue--slate industrial town. In every area there are always colors that at once look in keeping. In many areas there are distinctive traditions in the use of color that may be a useful guide. The eastern countries of England and Scotland, particularly those with a local tradition of rendering of plastering, use colors applied solidly over the wall. Usually only the window frames and doors are picked out in another color, often white or pale grey. Typical wall colors are the pink associated with Suffolk and pate buffs. Much stronger colors such as deep earth red, orange, blue and green are also common. In the coastal villages of Essex, as well as inland in Hertfordshire, the house--fronts of overlapping boards are traditionally painted black originally tarred like ships with windows and doors outlined in white. In Kent these weather boarded houses are usually white. In stone areas of Yorkshire and farther north, color is rare. the houses are usually left in their natural color, though many are painted white as they probably all were once.

单选题World leaders met recently at United Nations headquarters in New York City to discuss the environmental issues raised at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The heads of state were supposed to decide what further steps should be taken to halt the decline of Earth's life-support systems. In fact, this meeting had much the flavour of the original Earth Summit. To wit: empty promises, hollow rhetoric, bickering between rich and poor, and irrelevant initiatives. Think U.S. Congress in slow motion. Almost obscured by this torpor is the fact that there has been some remarkable progress over the past five years—real changes in the attitude of ordinary people in the Third World toward family size and a dawning realisation that environmental degradation and their own well-being are intimately, and inversely, linked. Almost none of this, however, has anything to do with what the bureaucrats accomplished in Rio. Or it didn't accomplish. One item on the agenda at Rio, for example, was a renewed effort to save tropical forests. (A previous UN-sponsored initiative had fallen apart when it became clear that it actually hastened deforestation.) After Rio, a UN working group came up with more than 100 recommendations that have so far gone nowhere. One proposed forestry pact would do little more than immunizing wood-exporting nations against trade sanctions. An effort to draft an agreement on what to do about the climate changes caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases has fared even worse. Blocked by the Bush Administration from setting mandatory limits, the UN in 1992 called on nations to voluntarily reduce emissions to 1990 levels. Several years later, it's as if Rio had never happened. A new climate treaty is scheduled to be signed this December in Kyoto, Japan, but governments still cannot agree on these limits. Meanwhile, the U.S. produces 7% more CO2 than it did in 1990, and emissions in the developing world have risen even more sharply. No one would confuse the "Rio process" with progress. While governments have dithered at a pace that could make drifting continents impatient, people have acted. Birth-rates are dropping faster than expected, not because of Rio but because poor people are deciding on their own to reduce family size. Another positive development has been a growing environmental consciousness among the poor. From slum dwellers in Karachi, Pakistan, to colonists in Rondonia, Brazil, urban poor and rural peasants alike seem to realize that they pay the biggest price for pollution and deforestation. There is cause for hope as well in the growing recognition among business people that it is net in their long-term interest to fight environmental reforms. John Browne, chief executive of British Petroleum, boldly asserted in a major speech in May that the threat of climate change could no longer be ignored.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Present-day philosophers usually envision their discipline as an endeavor that has been, since antiquity, distinct from and superior to any particular intellectual discipline, such as theology or science. Such philosophical concerns as the mind-body problem or, more generally, the nature of human knowledge, they believe, are basic human questions whose tentative philosophical solutions have served as the necessary foundations on which all other intellectual speculation has rested. The basis for this view, however, lies in a serious misinterpretation of the past, a projection of modern concerns onto past events. The idea of an autonomous discipline called "philosophy", distinct from and sitting in judgement on such pursuits as theology and science turns out, on close examination, to be of quite recent origin. When, in the seventeenth century, Descartes and Hobbes rejected medieval philosophy, they did not think of themselves, as modern philosophers do, as proposing a new and better philosophy, but rather as furthering "the warfare between science and theology". They were fighting, albeit discreetly, to open the intellectual world to the new science and to liberate intellectual life from ecclesiastical philosophy, and envisioned their work as contributing to the growth, not of philosophy, but of research in mathematics and physics. This link between philosophical interests and scientific practice persisted until the nineteenth century, when decline in ecclesiastical power over scholarship and changes in the nature of science provoked the final-separation of philosophy from both. The demarcation of philosophy from science was facilitated by the development in the early nineteenth century of a new notion, that philosophy's core interest should be epistemology, the general explanation of what it means to know something. Modern philosophers now trace that notion back at least to Descartes and Spinoza, but it was not explicitly articulated until the late eighteenth century, by Kant, and did not become built into the structure of academic institutions and the standard self-descriptions of philosophy professors until the late nineteenth century. Without the idea of epistemology, the survival of philosophy in an age of modern science is hard to imagine. Metaphysics philosophy's traditional core — considered as the most general description of how the heavens and the earth are put together — had been rendered almost completely meaningless by the spectacular progress of physics. Kant, however, by focusing philosophy on the problem of knowledge, managed to replace metaphysics with epistemology, and thus to transform the notion of philosophy as "queen of sciences" into the new notion of philosophy as a separate, foundational discipline. Philosophy became "primary" no longer in the sense of "highest" but in the sense of "underlying". After Kant, philosophers were able to reinterpret seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers as attempting to discover "How is our knowledge possible?" and to project this question back even on the ancients.

单选题According to shop-floor workers, where do managers really work hard?

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} "It doesn't matter what ethical assumptions you use," says Michael Grubb, an expert on climate change policy, cold financial arguments are enough to decide what to do about global warming. As arguments over the science behind climate change have cooled, the question of how much nations should be willing to pay has come to dominate the debate. Now Martin Weitzman has developed the first thorough method for including unlikely but extreme events in cost-benefit analyses. When you take into account extreme temperature rises of more than around 6℃, he says, they dominate all other options and effectively demand that investment aimed at stopping them be made now. Economists say that such events are theoretically possible but are so unlikely and lie so far in the future that it is not cost-effective to spend money to prevent them. Computer models also suggest that using more renewable energy and reducing emissions in other ways would almost certainly avoid extreme temperature increases. But Weitzman's results are so dramatic that some economists, many of whom argued in favour of caution, are shifting their position. Environmental groups argue that the risk of extreme events justifies large investment now, but other groups, notably industry-orientated think tanks and many Republican politicians, have resisted such calls. "In the United States, cost-benefit analyses have been used to back up questions about whether investment is worth much mow," says Grubb. "This throws a pretty fundamental spanner in the works." The new method also backs up the conclusions of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, albeit via different methods. Stem's cost-benefit analysis, which was published in October 2006, did not consider extreme events. Even so, he found that the benefits of investing now would be enormous: The world could save $2.5 trillion a year if the rise in CO2 was halted at levels around 50 percent greater than today. But when Stern put a price on the damages that rising temperatures could cause, he valued future costs in today's money. Many economists, including Weitzman, criticized that assumption, arguing that it ignores the fact that investments made now are expected to be worth more in the future. The debate remains unresolved, as ethical arguments continue to rage about how to value future generations. But Weitzman's study shows that once extreme evens are included, the argument becomes irrelevant. This is because the potential cost of extreme evens is so great that they come to dominate the assessment of risk, whatever method is used to compare the value of present and future generations. "Weitzman's work' would have received substantial attention in the Stem report. He would have used it as supporting evidence." Says Grubb. Weitzman could also create a headache for policy-makers. The analysis shows that traditional cost-benefit calculations are getting it wrong, but it does so only by providing that extreme events dominate the costs when included in the calculations. It cannot put a figure on how much should be spent now, unlike the old techniques.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Cyberspace, data superhighway, multimedia — for those who have seen the future, the linking of computers, television and telephones will change our lives for ever. Yet for all the talk of a forthcoming technological utopia, little attention has been given to the implications of these developments for the poor. As with all new high technology, while the West concerns itself with the "how", the question of "for whom" is put aside once again. Economists are only now realizing the full extent to which the communications revolution has affected the world economy. Information technology allows the extension of trade across geographical and industrial boundaries, and transnational corporations take full advantage of it. Terms of trade, exchange and interest rates and money movements are more important than the production of goods. The electronic economy made possible by information technology allows the haves to increase their control on global markets — with destructive impact on the have-nots. For them the result is instability. Developing countries which rely on the production of a small range of goods for export are made to feel like small parts in the international economic machine. As "futures" are traded on computer screens, developing countries simply have less and less control of their destinies. So what are the options for regaining control? One alternative is for developing countries to buy in the latest computers and telecommunications themselves — so-called "development communications" modernization. Yet this leads to long-term dependency and perhaps permanent constraints on developing countries' economies. Communications technology is generally exported from the US, Europe or Japan; the patents, skills and ability to manufacture remain in the hands of a few industrialized countries. It is also expensive, and imported products and services must therefore be bought on credit — usually provided by the very countries whose companies stand to gain. Furthermore, when new technology is introduced there is often too low a level of expertise to exploit it for native development. This means that while local elites, foreign communities and subsidiaries of transnational corporations may benefit, those whose lives depend on access to the information are denied it.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Foods are overwhelmingly the most advertised group of all consumer products in the United States. Food products lead in expenditures for network and spot television advertisements, discount coupons, trading stamps, contests, and other forms of premium advertising. In other media — newspapers, magazines, newspaper supplements, billboards, and radio — food advertising expenditures rank near the top. Food manufacturers spend more on advertising than any other manufacturing group, and the nation's grocery stores rank first among all retailers. Through the 1970's, highly processed foods have accounted for the bulk of total advertising. Almost all coupons, electronic advertising, national printed media advertising, consumer premiums (other than trading stamps) as well as most push promotion come from processed and packaged food products. In 1978, breakfast cereals, soft drinks, candy and other desserts, oils and salad dressings, coffee, and prepared foods accounted for only an estimated 20 percent of the consumer food dollar. Yet these items accounted for about one half of all media advertising. By contrast, highly perishable foods such as unprocessed meats, poultry, fish and eggs, fruits and vegetables, and diary products accounted for over half of the consumer food-at-home dollar. Yet these products accounted for less than 8 percent of national media advertising in 1978, and-virtually no discount coupons. These products tend to be most heavily advertised by the retail sector in local newspaper, where they account for an estimated 40 percent of retail grocery newspaper ads. When measured against total food-at-home expenditures, total measured food advertising accounts for between 3 and 3.7 cents out of every dollar spent on food in the nation's grocery stores. A little less than one cent of this amount is accounted for by electronic advertising (mostly television) while incentives account for 0.6 cents. The printed media account for 0.5 cents and about one-third of one cent is comprised of discount coupon redemptions. The estimate for the cost of push promotion ranges from 0.7 to 1.4 cents. This range is necessary because of the difficulty in separating non-promotional aspects of direct selling — transportation, technical, and other related services. Against this gross consumer cost must be weighed the joint products or services provided by advertising. In the case of electronic advertising, the consumer who views commercial television receives entertainment, while readers of magazines and newspapers receive reduced prices on these publications. The consumer pays directly for some premiums, but also receive nonfood merchandise as an incentive to purchase the product. The "benefits" must, therefore, be subtracted from the gross cost to the consumer to fully assess the net cost of advertising. Also significant are the impacts of advertising on food demand, nutrition, and competition among food manufacturers. The bulk of manufacturers' advertising is concentrated on a small portion of consumer food products. Has advertising changed the consumption of these highly processed products relative to more perishable foods such as meats, produce, and dairy products? Has the nutritional content of the U.S. food consumption been influenced by food advertising? Has competition among manufacturers and retailers been enhanced or weakened by advertising? These are important questions and warrant continued research.

单选题Questions 1～3 are based on the following talk, listen and choose the best answer.

单选题People's attitude toward drugs has become to resemble an emotional roller coaster, careening wildly from dizzy heights of pharmacologic faith to gloomy terror over drug hazards. A host of dreaded killers that had tyrannized the world for centuries can now be cured. That is a cause for some to regard drugs as "miraculous". On the other hand, there are hundreds of pitifully deformed babies born of mothers who had taken thalidomide -- the very thought of them causes terror. What is the-sensible attitude toward drugs? I think the first thing to think about is the differences between drugs and wonder drugs. The antibiotics, such as penicillin, can really cure certain bacterial diseases. On the other hand, the major diseases threatening Americans today are cancer, stroke, hypertension, coronary disease, arthritis and psychoses. Against them, the doctor's bag of tricks is limited. He has no wonder drug. Of course, many patients suffering from these illnesses can be improved by taking drugs and a few can be dramatically helped. But no drug has cured a single case of schizophrenia or rheumatoid arthritis, in the way that penicillin can cure pneumonia or meningococcal meningitis. So the first important lesson is not to expect too much from drugs. Too many patients exert unholy pressures on doctors to prescribe for every symptom, even when such treatment is unwarranted or dangerous. Unfortunately, the medical profession is guilty of some complicity here The patient who demands a shot of penicillin for every sniffle and sneeze may be given the injection by a reluctant physician because he is certain that if he does not, the patient will search until he or she finds a doctor who will. More important, the physician is apt to be a willing collaborator in over-medication because he, too, has been oversold on drugs. He is rarely at a loss for a remedy that might be just what the patient needs. Doctors want their patients to get well. They also derive feelings of power and ego-satisfaction from the ability to pre- scribe the latest drugs. At the other extreme is the patient who is suspicious of all medications. In the category are the patients who never take an aspirin tablet because they believe that "every aspirin you take leaves a scar on the lining of your stomach". Without doubt, such ill-advised behavior is at times traceable to lurid accounts of drug dangers. Not long ago, when one antidepressant drug was temporarily withdrawn from the market by the Food and Drug Administration, radio and television stations in New York carried stories about that. Patients were advised by commentators not to take any medication at all. The resulting hysteria in hundreds of patients was as real as it was predictable.

单选题

单选题It can be inferred that non-human primates______.

单选题Whendidthewomangiveupsmoking?A.Tendaysago.B.Justthismorning.C.Aweekago.D.Justyesterday.

单选题She was so angry at all ____he was doing _____she walked out without saying a word.

单选题{{B}}TEXT 3{{/B}} Many language teachers and learners tend to ask the question: Why should we teach or learn linguistics? Since linguistics is defined as the scientific study of language, it seems obvious that such a study would help a lot in language teaching and learning, although there is much difference between linguistics and language teaching or learning in their attitudes towards language, their goals, and their methods. Language is viewed as a system of forms in linguistics, but it is regarded as a set of skills in the field of language teaching. Linguistic research is concerned with the establishment of theories which explains the phenomena of language, whereas language teaching aims at the learner's mastery of language. To bridge the gap between the theories of/linguistics and the practice of foreign language teaching, APPLIED LINGUISTICS serves as a mediating area which interprets the results of linguistic theories and makes them user-friendly to the language teacher and learner. Applied linguistics is conducive to foreign language teaching in two major aspects: Firstly, applied linguistics extends theoretical linguistics in the direction of language learning and teaching, so that the teacher is enabled to make better decisions on the goal and content of the teaching. When faced with the task of designing a syllabus, the teacher has a number of choices. Should he set out to teach the language used in literary works, or that in daily communication? Should he teach the general system of the language, or a part of this system? What are the principles of compiling or choosing text book? What kind of exercise is most suitable? To answer these questions, the teacher is consciously or unconsciously using his understanding of the nature of language learning. Applied linguistics provides the teacher with a formal knowledge of the nature of language and language system, and thus increases his understanding of the nature of language learning. As a result, the teacher can make more informed decisions on what approach to take, hence what to teach. Secondly, applied linguistics states the insights and implications that linguistic theories have on the language teaching methodology. Once the goal and content of the teaching are settled, the teacher has to consider questions of how to teach. Should the teaching-learning process be teacher-centred, textbook-centred, or learner-centred? How should the learner's errors be treated? What techniques should be adopted in the classroom? Since applied linguistics defines the nature of language learning in connection with various linguistic theories, it helps the teacher to choose teaching methods and techniques.

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

单选题What'sthetopicofthepassage?A.Reason'sforPeople'sSleepB.FourStagesofSleepC.ReasonsforSleepwalkingD.ASleepExperiment

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