单选题Questions 17—20 are based on the following passage.

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 not 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 Questions 17 to 20 are based on a talk about two means of travelling in America. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.

单选题 In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees—each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow its leaders to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism. And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to reduce global warming? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation? Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining harness over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict. As the UNDP emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two parties with little or no political voice". Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment or the transformation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas reduction could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living—none of which seems highly likely. And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of stimulating heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drives elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global intervention, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be silently abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet. Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps, the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low-, or zero-emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the combined impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously threaten growth.

单选题What is the best title of this passage?

单选题Not long ago, a mysterious Christmas card dropped through our mail slot. The envelope was addressed to a man named Raoul, who, I was relatively certain, did not live with us. The envelope wasn't sealed, so I opened it. The inside of the card was blank. Ed, my husband, explained that the card was both from and to the newspaper deliveryman. His name was apparently Raoul, and Raoul wanted a holiday tip. We were meant to put a check inside the card and then drop the envelope in the mail. When your services are rendered at 4 a.m., you can't simply hang around, like a hotel bellboy expecting a tip. You have to be direct. So I wrote a nice holiday greeting to this man who, in my imagination, fires The New York Times from his bike aimed at our front door, causing more noise with mere newsprint than most people manage with sophisticated black market fireworks. With a start, I realized that perhaps the reason for the 4 a.m. —wake-up noise was not ordinary rudeness but carefully executed spite: I had not tipped Raoul in Christmases past. I honestly hadn't realized I was supposed to. This was the first time he'd used the card tactic. So I got out my checkbook. Somewhere along the line, holiday tipping went from an optional thank-you for a year of services to a Mafia-style protection racket (收取保护费的黑社会组织). Several days later, I was bringing our garbage bins back from the curb when I noticed an envelope taped to one of the lids. The outside of the envelope said MICKEY. It had to be another tip request, this time from our garbage collector. Unlike Raoul, Mickey hadn't enclosed his own Christmas card from me. In a way, I appreciated the directness. "I know you don't care how merry my Christmas is, and that's fine," the gesture said. "I want $30, or I'll 'forget' to empty your garbage bin some hot summer day." I put a check in the envelope and taped it back to the bin. The next morning, Ed noticed that the envelope was gone, though the trash hadn't yet been picked up. "Someone stole Mickey's tip!" Ed was quite certain. He made me call the bank and cancel the check. But Ed had been wrong. Two weeks later, Mickey left a letter from the bank on our steps. The letter informed Mickey that the check, which he had tried to cash, had been cancelled. The following Tuesday morning, when Ed saw a truck outside, he ran out with his wallet. "Are you Mickey?" The man looked at him with scorn. "Mickey is the garbageman. I am the recycling." Not only had Ed insulted this man by hinting that he was a garbageman, but he had obviously neglected to tip him. Ed ran back inside for more funds. Then he noticed that the driver of the truck had been watching the whole transaction. He peeled off another twenty and looked around, waving bills in the air. "Anyone else?" Had we consulted the website of the Emily Post Institute, this embarrassing breach of etiquette (礼节) could have been avoided. Under "trash/recycling collectors" in the institute's Holiday Tipping Guidelines, it says, "$10 to $30 each." You may or may not wish to know that your pet groomer, hairdresser, mailman and UPS guy all expect a holiday tip.

单选题Questions 19～21 are based on the following talk．

单选题{{I}} Questions 17 to 20 are based on the following monologue about energy conservation. You now have 20 .seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.{{/I}}

单选题According to Lemaitre, the separate galaxies formed ______.

单选题Considering how jazz is transcribed in Chinese (jueshi), you may be misled into assuming that it is an aristocratic cultural form. Nothing could be further from the truth. It originated among black Americans at the end of the 19th century, at a time when they occupied the very bottom of the American social heap. So how has something that was created by a once downtrodden and despised minority acquired a central place in today's American culture? Perhaps the essence of America is that you could never get two Americans to agree on just what that might be. After thinking about it for a while, we might chuckle and say, "Hmm, seems like being American is a bit more complicated than we thought." Certainly things like individualism, success (the "American Dream"), innovation and tolerance stand out. But these things come together because of our ability to work with one another and find common purpose no matter how diverse we might be. Some, like African-American writer Ralph Ellison, believe that jazz captures the essence of America. For good reason, for in jazz all of the characteristics I mentioned above come together. The solos are a celebration of individual brilliance that can't take place without the group efforts of the rhythm section. Beyond that, though, jazz has a connection to the essence of America in a much more fundamental way. It is an expression of the African roots of American culture, a musical medium that exemplifies the culture of the Africans that came to dominate much of what is American. That's right, in many respects America's roots are in Africa. Read Ralph Ellison's perceptive description of the transformation of separate African and European cultures at the hands of the slaves: "... the dancing of those slaves who, looking through the windows of a plantation manor house from the yard, imitated the steps so gravely performed by the masters within and then added to them their own special flair, burlesquing the white folks and then going on to force the steps into a choreography uniquely their own. The whites, looking out at the activity in the yard, thought that they were being flattered by imitation and were amused by the incongruity of tattered blacks dancing courtly steps, while missing completely the fact that before their eyes a European cultural form was becoming Americanized, undergoing a metamorphosis through the mocking activity of a people partially sprung from Africa." Jazz brought together elements from Africa and Europe, fusing them into a new culture, an expression unique to the Americas. Out of this fusion came an idea that we Americans believe central to our identity: tolerance. Both cultures represented in Ellison's passage eventually came to realize each other's value. Americans acknowledge that in diversity is our strength. We learn every day that other cultures and peoples may make valuable contributions to our way of life. Jazz music is the embodiment of this ideal, combining elements from African and European culture into a distinctly American music. Jazz reflects two contradictory facets of American life. On the one hand it is a team effort, where every musician is completely immersed in what the group does together, listening to each of the other players and building on their contributions to create a musical whole. On the other hand, the band features a soloist who is an individual at the extreme, a genius like Charlie Parker who explores musical territory where no one has ever gone before. In the same sense, American life is also a combination of teamwork and individualism, a combination of individual brilliance with the ability to work with others.

单选题New Zealand is in ______, halfway between the equator and the South Pole. A. the Southern Pacific Ocean B. the Northern Pacific Ocean C. the Atlantic Ocean D. the Indian Ocean

单选题Print on paper is a little like democracy: the worst possible system except for all the others. Books are fragile, they are bulky, they are not easy to search through. They are certainly not suited to computerization. Yet printed volumes have endured half a millennium as readable as the day they came off the press, whereas digital data a mere 30 years old may have vanished past hope of retrieval. The film Into the Future: On the preservation of knowledge in the Electronic Age is itself an object lesson in how fast digital information becomes obsolete. One of the pioneering interactive-media companies whose workers and products appear on screen ceased operations shortly after being fihned. All the software whose images define "the Internet" is long since replaced. How fast do archivists have to run to stay in the same place? Just plain data must be recopied onto new media every 10 years to stay ahead of physical deterioration and the junking of machines that can read outdated formats. Given this galloping obsolescence, it seems ironic that the film's creators should have devoted a significant part of its time to the digitizing of paper archives. And yet they -and we -have no choice: the digital bug has infected us all, and interactive multimedia, with indexed and linked text, pictures and sound, have a convenience and impact that make conversion irresistible. The growing popularity of the World Wide Web offers some hope that publishers and archivists can format both old and new data in ways that will remain understandable for decades rather than months. But the Web brings its own complications. New, undescribed classes of collected information live on the Web in forms that confuse conventional notions of what a document is. How should -or can -such a single separate and independent existence be archived without potentially archiving the entire Web? Many Web pages are not even fixed documents in the most basic sense. Two users who ask their Web browsers to open the same "document" may see quite different things on their screens. Besides, the fastest connections on the Internet transmit a mere 45 million bits per second, and so even a single snapshot of the trillion or more bytes available on the Web would take weeks of computer and network time. Meanwhile new sites spring up every day, and some existing sites change their information from minute to minute. In a sense, then, the Web has moved from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian model: it makes no more sense to speak of the state of the Web now than it does to speak of synchronizing clocks located far apart. By the time information has gone from here to there, it is already out of date. It seems strange that a medium intended for the widest possible distribution of knowledge should demonstrate the impossibility of acquiring complete information. Where the Web was once a map for finding useful information in the "real world," it is now a territory where that information, ever changing, resides.

单选题Why does the author say that "we need a Plan C"?

单选题WhichofthefollowingisTRUEaboutthesafetyofputtingphotosonline?A.Donotcopyorpastepicturestoyourwebsite.B.Sanitizingyourphotosonlineguaranteestheirsafety.C.Comparedwithemails,websitesareSafertosharephotos.D.Evenyourfriendsmayuseyourphotosforabadpurpose.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Allergies cause heaps of trouble. Some people suffer the nuisance of seasonal hay fever, snuffling and sneezing as pollen flows through the air. Others react to materials such as metals, developing unpleasant rashes at their very touch. And some sorry souls go into shock at the mere presence of certain foods, particularly peanuts and shellfish. The cause in each case is an oversensitive immune system that is reacting to harmless materials as well as to the pathogens it is supposed to be fighting. This creates annoying and sometimes life-threatening symptoms. Chronically over-reactive immune systems may not, though, be an entirely bad thing. Another role played by the immune system is to destroy malignant tumours before they take hold—and work carried out recently by Annette Wigertz of the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, and her colleagues suggests that the immune systems of those with allergies may be particularly good at this. However, in a nice example of the way that one set of data is sometimes capable of divergent—indeed, opposite—interpretations, she may instead have discovered a clue about how cancers shut down immune systems in order that they themselves may prosper. This Manichean finding came after Dr. Wigertz and her team interviewed 1,527 people with gliomas (a type of brain turnout) in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the south-east of England. The researchers asked the patients in question whether they had a history of allergies, and then compared the results with those for 3,309 otherwise similar individuals who did not have brain tumours. As Dr. Wigertz reports in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the tumour-free were, indeed, more likely to suffer from allergies. The presence of an allergy was associated with a 30% reduction in the likelihood of having a glioma. This was not all that surprising. Previous research had detected similar inverse correlations between allergies and brain tumours, suggesting that a welcome side effect of allergy was resistance to cancer. But this new study went further. It looked carefully at the time in the patients' lives when their allergies were active, and it found that this timing was crucial. Dr. Wigertz noted that the absence of allergy was correlated with the time when a glioma first formed. That was true even in people who had previously had allergies which had then cleared up. Awkwardly, this result is open to two rather different interpretations. The optimistic explanation is that the hyperactive immune system associated with allergy does, indeed, protect against turnouts. In that case, the coincidence was caused by turnouts taking advantage, as it were, of the reduced immune surveillance that accompanied the disappearance of the allergy. The sinister interpretation is that tumours are doing something as they grow that suppresses the immune system and thus allergic reactions. Either way, turnout and lack of allergy coincide. And either way, something interesting is going on. But Dr. Wigertz's result illustrates the perils of leaping to conclusions on the basis of incomplete data.

单选题It was a cold, rainy and wholly miserable afternoon in Washington, and a hot muggy night in Miami. It was Sunday, and three games were played in the two cities. The people playing them and the people watching them tell us much about the ever-changing ethnic structure of the United States. American males are more addicted to sports than females are, but not by a huge margin. Females are more addicted to the theatre and concert halls than males are, but not by a huge margin. In our electronic age, addicts and experts alike can be couch potatoes, enjoying their entertainments from the comfort of home. Tree fans get off their butts and go. The three games in the two cities on that miserable Sunday afternoon had respective attendances of 75, 061, 67, 204 and 57, 318. The biggest crowd watched professional football, in which the Washington Redskins were beaten by the Baltimore Ravens. The crowds sat in the cold and rain, and most of them endured the weather to the bitter end because the outcome of the game was in doubt. Professional football in the United States is almost wholly played by native-born American citizens, mostly very large and very strong, many of them black. It is a game of physical strength. Linemen routinely weigh more than 300 pounds. Players are valued for their weight and muscles, for how fast they can run, and how hard they can hit each other. Football draws the biggest crowds, but the teams play only once a week, because they get so battered. The 67, 204 fans were in Miami for the final game of the baseball World Series. Baseball was once America's favourite game, but has lost that claim to basketball. The 1997 World Series was much reviled in the news media of the largest cities, mostly because they had been shut out of it. NBC, which broadcast the Series, wished loudly that it hadn't. Despite all the bad press, every game was sold out and double the tickets could have been sold had the stadiums accommodated more people. Baseball is a game that requires strength, but not hugeness. Agility, quickness, perfect vision and quick reaction are more important than pure strength. Baseball was once a purely American game, but has spread around much of the New World. In that Sunday's finale, the final hit of the extra inning game was delivered by a native of Columbia. The Most Valuable Player in the game was a native of Cuba. The rosters of both teams were awash with Hispanic names, as is Miami, which now claims the World Championship is a game that may be losing popularity in America, but has gained it in much of the rest of the world. Baseball in America has taken on a strong Hispanic flavor, with a dash of Japanese added for seasoning. In soccer, the ethnic tide has been the reverse of baseball's. Until recently, professional soccer in the United States had largely been an import, played by south Americans and Europeans. Now, American citizens in large numbers are finally taking up the most popular game in the world. Basketball, an American invention increasingly played around the world, these days draws large crowds back home. Likewise, hockey, a game largely imported to the United States from neighbouring Canada. Lacrosse, a version of which was played by Native Americans before the Europeans arrived, is also gaining a keen national following. Sports of all kinds are winning support from American armchair enthusiasts from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

单选题We learn from the passage that schools in Kalkaska, Michigan, are funded ______.

单选题In 1865, ______ by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. [A] woman obtained voting right [B] liquor was abolished [C] the slavery was legally abolished [D] citizens of the United States got the equal protection of laws

单选题The main idea of this passage is about ________.

单选题What'sthemainpurposeofthetalk?A.Tointroducetheconceptofinflation.B.Todiscussthecausesofinflation.C.Toreviewyesterday'slectureoninflation.D.Toargueinfavorofinflation.