单选题You will hear 3 conversations or talks and you must answer the questions by choosing A, B, C or D. You will hear the recording only once.

单选题Which of the following might be the result from the use of efficient technology in corporations?

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In politics, astronauts are generally

单选题What is the major feature of the new retail programs?

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} In the early days of the United States, postal charges were paid by the recipient and Charges varied with the distance carried. In 1825, the United States Congress permitted local postmasters to give letters to mail carriers for home delivery, but these carriers received no government salary and their entire compensation depended on what they were paid by the recipients of individual letters. In 1847 the United States Post Office Department adopted the idea of a postage stamp, which of course simplified the payment for postal service but caused grumbling by those who did not like to prepay. Besides, the stamp covered only delivery to the post office and did not include carrying it to a private address. In Philadelphia, for example, with a population of 150, 000, people still had to go to the post office go get their mail. The confusion and congestion of individual citizens looking for their letters was itself enough to discourage use of the mail. It is no wonder that, during the years of these cumbersome arrangements, private letter-carrying and express businesses developed. Although their activities were only semilegal, they thrived, and actually advertised that between Boston and Philadelphia they were a half-day speedier than the government mail. The government postal service lost volume to private competition and was not able to handle efficiently even the business it had. Finally, in 1863, Congress provided that the mail carriers who delivered the mail from the post offices to private addresses should receive a government salary, and that there should be no extra charge for that delivery. But this delivery service was at first confined to cities, and free home delivery became a mark of urbanism. As late as 1887, a town had to have 10,000 people to be eligible for free home delivery. In 1890, of the 75 million people in the United States, fewer than 20 million had mail delivered free to their doors. The rest, nearly threequar-ters of the population, still received no mail unless they went to their post office.

单选题The old buffalo was killed because______ .

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

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单选题The history of responses to the work of the artist Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) suggests that widespread appreciation by critics is a relatively recent phenomenon. Writing in 1550, Vasari expressed an unease with Botticelli's work, admitting that the artist fitted awkwardly into his evolutionary scheme of the history of art. Over the next two centuries, academic art historians defamed Botticelli in favor of his fellows Florentine, Michelangelo. Even when anti-academic art historians of the early nineteenth century rejected many of the standards of evaluation adopted by their predecessors, Botticelli's work remained outside of accepted taste, pleasing neither amateur observers nor connoisseurs. (Many of his best paintings, however, remained hidden away in obscure churches and private homes.) The primary reason for Botticelli's unpopularity is not difficult to understand: most observers, up until the mid-nineteenth century, did not consider him to be noteworthy, because his work, for the most part, did not seem to these observers to exhibit the traditional characteristics of the fifteenth-century Florentine art. For example, Botticelli rarely employed the technique of strict perspective and, unlike Michelangelo, never used chiaroscuro. Another reason for Botticelli's unpopularity may have been that his attitude toward the style of classical art was very different from that of his contemporaries. Although he was thoroughly exposed to classical art, he showed little interest in borrowing from the classical style. Indeed, it is paradoxical that a painter of large-scale classical subjects adopted a style that was only slightly similar to that of classical art. In any case, when viewers began to examine more closely the relationship of Botticelli's work to the tradition of the fifteenth century Florentine art, his reputation began to grow. Analyses and assessments of Botticelli made between 1850 and 1870 by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as well as by the writer Pater (although he, unfortunately, based his assessment on an incorrect analysis of Botticelli's personality), inspired a new appreciation of Botticelli throughout the English-speaking world. Yet Botticelli's work, especially the Sistine frescoes, did not generate worldwide attention until it was finally subjected to a comprehensive and scrupulous analysis by Home in 1908. Home rightly demonstrated that the frescoes shared important features with paintings by other fifteenth-century Florentines—features such as skillful representation of anatomical proportions, and of the human figure in motion. However, Home argued that Botticelli did not treat these qualities as ends in themselves—rather, that he emphasized clear depletion of a story, a unique achievement and one that made the traditional Florentine qualities less central. Because of Home's emphasis crucial to any study of art, the twentieth century has come to appreciate Botticelli's achievements.

单选题Why is the question of trade union power important in Britain?

单选题 Questions 17 to 20 are based on the following conversation between Sarah and John. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.

单选题Text 3 Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they art-boring they corrupt the silence with non-sequiturs, shattering your concentration with "Oh, look, it's raining," and "You see it lots of trees here. " Traveling on your own can be terribly lonely (and it is not understood by Japanese who, coming across you smiling wistfully at an acre of Mexican butter cups tend to say things like "Where is the rest of your team?"), I think of evening in the hotel room in the strange city. My diary has been brought up to date; I hanker for company: what do I do? I don't know anyone there, so I go out and walk and discover the three streets of the town and rather envy the strolling couples and the people with children. The museums and churches are closed, and toward midnight the streets are empty. If I am mugged, I will have to apologize as politely as possible, "I am sorry, sir, but I has nothing valuable on my person." Is there a surer way of enraging a thief and driving him to violence? It is hard to, we clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel, self-conscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone close by is thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery, not diversion, that I seek. What is requited is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision, which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling abject that quickens my mind and makes it intensely receptive to fugitive might also be verified and refined; and in any case I had the satisfaction of finishing the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest, "Have a nice time," people said to me at my send-off at South Station, Medford. It was not precisely what I had hoped for. I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude. This I thought might be mine on that train to Limon.

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

单选题Part B In the following article some paragraphs or sentences have been removed. For questions, choose the most suitable paragraph or sentence from the lists A—F to fit into each of the numbered gaps. There is one paragraph which doesn't fit in any of the gaps. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET 1. Nearly three years ago, I tested positive for HIV. Since then I have discovered a support system that steadfastly refuses to encourage responsible behavior, and a society whose silence ensures the continued spread of this disease. 16. ____________ The people I am talking about are nothing like Nushawn William, the drug dealer who is believed to have infected numerous people in New York State. They did not grow up in ghettos surrounded by street gangs. They come from stable homes in safe neighborhoods. They went to high school and college and graduate school. 17.____________ We are more than 15 years into the MDS epidemic, and I have been asked my status by prospective partners only twice. Since testing positive, I've made a point of disclosing my status to any potential partner; all but one told me I was the first person to do so. Each believed that if he practiced safe sex, there would be no need to know. There is no such thing as safe sex, only levels of risk that one must choose. In making that choice, a partner's HIV status is the critical piece of information. 18.____________ The CDC will only "suggest that you might want to consider informing your partner," a hot-line counselor told me. Counselors at the San Franciso AIDS Foundation said it was their job to dispense information, not moral or ethical recommendations, and, again, that I must do what makes me feel comfortable. 19. ____________ The emphasis on the individual's right, without an equally strong emphasis on the individual's responsibility, is wrong and is a direct cause of the spread of this disease. 20.____________ [A] We are not talking about being comfortable here. We are talking about life and death. [B] Groups such as the Gay Men's Health Crisis claim they cannot dictate behavior Granted. But that is all the more reason that AIDS organizations have a responsibility to encourage people who are HIV positive to do what is right. [C] Most HIV-positive people I have encountered do not voluntarily disclose their status to potential partners. Indeed, even people in long-term relationships lie about their status. These are the realities of HIV transmission today. [D] For years the AIDS community has rallied around the battle cry "Silence=Death.'' What it has failed to realize is that silence comes in many forms and that all are lethal. [E] They remain silent because it is difficult to tell the truth, and because their friends and community support them in their silence. Their doctors, psychiatrists, even the AIDS organizations they call for help, offer comfort and sympathy but don't necessarily encourage them to tell the truth. [F] Leading advocacy groups have perpetuated the culture of irresponsibility. Last year when I called the hot line for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the nation's leading AIDS service agencies, I was advised to "experiment" informing some partners of my HIV status while remaining silent with others. In this way I could decide which was more comfortable for me.

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Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following dialogue in a wedding anniversary. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.

单选题Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following news report about challenges facing Australia"s agriculture sector. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.

单选题Questions 14—16 are based on the following talk.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Years of watching and comparing bright children and those not bright, or less bright, have shown that they are very different kinds of people. The bright child is curious about life and reality, eager to get in touch with it, embrace it, unite himself with it. There is no wall, no barrier between him and life. The dull child is far less curious, far less interested in what goes on and what is real, more inclined to live in worlds of fantasy. The bright child likes to experiment, to try things out. He lives by the maxim that there is more than one way to skin a cat. If he can't do something one way, he'll try another. The dull child is usually afraid to try at all. It takes a good deal of urging to get him to try even once; if that try fails, he is through. The bright child is patient. He can tolerate uncertainty and failure, and will keep trying until he gets an answer. When all his experiments fail, he can even admit to himself and others that for the time being he is not going to get an answer. This may annoy him, but he can wait. Very often, he does not want to be told how to do the problem or solve the puzzle he has struggled with, because he does not want to be cheated out of the chance to figure it out for himself in the future. Not so the dull child. He cannot stand uncertainty or failure. To him, an unanswered question is not a challenge or an opportunity, but a threat. If he can't find the answer quickly, it must be given to him, and quickly; and he must have answers for everything. Such are the children of whom a second-grade teacher once said, "But my children like to have questions for which there is only one answer." They did; and by a mysterious coincidence, so did she. The bright child is willing to go ahead on the basis of incomplete understanding and information. He will take risks, sail uncharted seas, explore when the landscape is dim, the landmarks few, the light poor. To give only one example, he will often read books he does not understand in the hope that after a while enough understanding will emerge to make it worthwhile to go on. In this spirit some of my fifth graders tried to read Moby Dick. But the dull child will go ahead only when he thinks he knows exactly where he stands and exactly what is ahead of him. If he does not feel he knows exactly what an experience will be like, and if it will not be exactly like other experiences he already knows, he wants no part of it. For while the bright child feels that the universe is, on the whole, a sensible, reasonable, and trustworthy place, the dull child feels that it is senseless, unpredictable, and treacherous. He feels that he can never tell what may happen, particularly in a new situation, except that it will probably be bad.