单选题 BQuestions 14 ～ 16 are based on the following conversation. You now have 15 seconds to rend Questions 14 ～ 16./B

单选题 Stockbrokers are agents who buy and sell stocks, shares and other securities for their clients. They are paid commission. Jobbers, on the other hand, buy and sell securities in large quantities. They are the wholesalers. The jobbers are always to be found in the same spot in the London Stock Exchange. They congregate according to the type of security they specialize in. So you can find all the jobbers dealing with rubber shares in one place, those interested in shipping another, those concerned with mining in another, and so on. Jobbers make a profit like any other dealer. They usually quote two prices; they are prepared to buy any reasonable quantity of that share at the lower price, and to sell at the higher price. These prices vary, of course, from day to day and even hour to hour, according to the demand. Perhaps a broke wants to sell five hundred shares in XYZ Pharmaceuticals for a client. He looks for the jobbers who deal in pharmaceutical shares. He asks the price of XYZ Pharmaceuticals, without saying whether he wishes to buy or sell. The jobber quotes him two prices—perhaps 75/79. This means that he will buy quantities of that share at 75 pence each, and sell them at 79 pence each. The broker then goes on to other jobbers and asks them the same question. Eventually he chooses the best offer. The two men make a verbal agreement (nothing is written at this stage) and from that moment the broker's client is the owner of those shares. When he goes back to his office, the broker has to write out a "contract note", which he sends to his client. This records the price, his commission, the tax on the transaction, and so on. For payment, both the buyer and the seller must sign transfer forms; these are sent to XYZ Pharmaceuticals for registration. Later, the buyer gets a certificate of the shares. The deal is now complete. The London Stock Exchange has always been famous as a place for men. only, and women used to be strictly forbidden to enter. But the world is changing day by day, and even the Stock Exchange, which seemed to be a man's castle, is gradually opening its doors to the other sex. On 16th November, 1971, a great decision was taken. The Stock Exchange Council (the body of men that administers the Stock Exchange) decided that Women should be allowed on to the new trading floor when it opened in 1973. But the "castle" had not been completely conquered. The first girls to work in "The House" were not brokers or jobbers. They were neither allowed to become partners in stockbroking firms, nor to be authorized dealers in stocks and shares. They were simply junior clerks and telephone operators. Women have been trying to get into the Stock Exchange for many years. Several votes have been taken in "The House" to see whether the members would be willing to allow women to become members, but the answer has always been "NO". There have been three refusals of this kind since 1967. Now women are admitted, although in a very junior capacity. Two firms of jobbers made an application to the Stock Exchange Council to be allowed to employ girl clerks. Permission was finally given. A member of the Stock Exchange explained, after this news had been given, "The new floor is going to be different from the old one. All the jobbers will have their own stands, with space for a telephone and typewriters. Therefore there will have to be typists and telephone operators. So women must be allowed in." This decision did not mean a very great victory in the war for equal rights for women. However, it was a step in the right direction. The Chairman of the Stock Exchange said, "I think that the opening of the new building will eventually lead to women being allowed to have full membership of the Stock Exchange. It is only a matter of time; it must happen".

单选题The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may not seem harmful—so much so that many consumers do it with no questions asked. Yet that one action can set in motion a cascade of silent events, as that data point is acquired, analyzed, categorized, stored and sold over and over again. Future attacks on your privacy may come from anywhere, from anyone with money to purchase that phone number you surrendered. If you doubt the multiplier effect, consider your e-mail inbox. If it"s loaded with spam, it"s undoubtedly because at some point you unknowingly surrendered your e-mail to the wrong website. Do you think your telephone number or address is handled differently? A cottage industry of small companies with names you"ve probably never heard of—like Acxiom or Merlin—buy and sell your personal information the way other commodities like corn or cattle futures are bartered. You may think your ceil phone is unlisted, but if you"ve ever ordered a pizza, it might not be. Merlin is one of many commercial data brokers that advertises sale of unlisted phone numbers compiled from various sources—including pizza delivery companies. These unintended, unpredictable consequences that flow from simple actions make privacy issues difficult to grasp, and grapple with. In a larger sense, privacy also is often cast as a tale of "Big Brother" —the government is watching you or an big corporation is watching you. But privacy issues don"t necessarily involve large faceless institutions.. A spouse takes a casual glance at her husband"s Blackberry, a co-worker looks at e-mail over your shoulder or a friend glances at a cell phone text message from the next seat on the bus. While very little of this is new to anyone—people are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere— there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department"s antitrust case against Microsoft. And polls and studies have repeatedly shown that Americans are indifferent to privacy concerns. The general defense for such indifference is summed up as a single phrase. "I have nothing to hide. " If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn"t the government be able to peek at your phone records, your wife see your e-mail or a company send you junk mail? It"s a powerful argument, one that privacy advocates spend considerable time discussing and strategizing over. It is hard to deny, however, that people behave different when they"re being watched. And it is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history.

单选题Mass transportation revised the social and economic fabric of the American city in three fundamental ways. It catalyzed physical expansion, it sorted out people and land uses, and it accelerated the inherent instability of urban life, By opening vast areas of unoccupied land for residential expansion, the omnibuses, horse railways, commuter trains, and electric trolleys pulled settled regions outward two to four times more distant from city centers than they were in the pre-modern era. In 1850, for example, the borders of Boston lay scarcely two miles from the old business district; by the end of the century the radius extended ten miles. Now those who could afford it could live far removed from the old city center and still commute there for work, shopping, and entertainment. The new accessibility of land around the periphery of almost every major city sparked an explosion of real estate development and fueled what we now know as urban sprawl. Between 1890 and 1920, for example, some 250, 000 new residential lots were recorded within the borders of Chicago, most of them located in outlying areas. Over the same period, another 550,000 were plotted outside the City limits but within the metropolitan area. Anxious to take advantage of the possibilities of commuting, real estate developers added 800, 000 potential building sites to the Chicago region in just thirty years—lots that could have housed five to six million people. Of course, many were never occupied: there was always a huge surplus of subdivided but vacant land around Chicago and other cities. These excesses underscore a feature of residential expansion related to the growth of mass transportation: urban sprawl was essentially unplanned. It was carded out by thousands of small investors who paid little heed to coordinated land use or to future land users. Those who purchased and prepared land for residential purposes, particularly land near or outside city borders where transit lines and middle-class inhabitants were anticipated, did so to create demand as much as to respond to it. Chicago is a prime example of this process. Real estate subdivision there proceeded much faster than population growth.

单选题 Questions 14—17 are based on the following talk.

单选题Fish farming in the desert may at first sound like an anomaly, but in Israel over the last decade a scientific hunch has turned into a bustling business. Scientists here say they realized they were no to something when they found that brackish water drilled from underground desert aquifers (含土水层) hundreds of feet deep could be used to raise warm-water fish. The geothermal water, less than one-tenth as saline as sea water, free of pollutants and a toasty 98 degrees on average, proved an ideal match. "It was not simple to convince people that growing fish in the desert makes sense," said Samuel Appelbaum, a professor and fish biologist at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at the Sede Boqer campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. "It is important to stop with the reputation that arid land is nonfertile, useless land," said Professor Appelbaum, who pioneered the concept of desert aquaculture in Israel in the late 1980s. "We should consider arid land where subsurface water exists as land that has great opportunities, especially in food production because of the low level of competition on the land itself and because it gives opportunities to its inhabitants." The next step in this country, where water is scarce and expensive, was to show farmers that they could later use the water in which the fish are raised to irrigate their crops in a system called double usage. The organic waste produced by the cultured fish makes the water especially useful, because it acts as fertilizer for the crops. Fields watered by brackish water dot Israel's Negev and Arava Deserts in the south of the country, where they spread out like green blankets against a landscape of sand dunes and rocky outcrops. At Kibbutz Mashabbe Sade in the Negev, the recycled water from the fish ponds is used to irrigate acres of olive and jojoba groves. Elsewhere it is also used for irrigating date palms and alfalfa. The chain of multiple users for the water is potentially a model that can be copied, especially in arid third world countries where farmers struggle to produce crops, and Israeli scientists have recently been peddling their ideas abroad. Dry lands cover about 40 percent of the planet, and the people who live on them are often among the poorest in the world. Scientists are working to share the desert aquaculture technology they fine-turned here with Tanzania, India, Australia and China, among others. (Similar methods offish farming are being used in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.) "Each farm could run itself, which is important in the developing world," said Alon Tal, a leading Israeli environmental activist who recently organized a conference on desertification, with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and Ben-Gurion University, that brought policy makers and scientists from 30 countries to Israel. "A whole village could adopt such a system," Dr. Tal added. At the conference, Gregoire de Kalbermatten, deputy secretary general of the antidesertification group at the United Nations, said, "We need to learn from the resilience of Israel in developing dry lands." Israel, long heralded for its agricultural success in the desert through innovative technologies like drip irrigation, has found ways to use low-quality water and what is considered terrible soil to grow produce like sweet cherry tomatoes, people, asparagus and melon, marketing much of it abroad to Europe, especially during winter. The history of fish-farming in nondesert areas here, mostly in the Galilee region near the sea, dates back to the late 1920s, before Israel was established as a state. At the time, the country was extremely poor and meat was considered a luxury. But fish was a cheap food source, so fish farms were set up on several kibbutzim in the Galilee. The early Jewish farmers were mostly Eastern Europeans, and Professor Safriel said, "they only knew gefilte fish, so they grew carp." Eventually they expanded to other varieties of fish including tilapia, striped bass and mullet, as well as ornamental fish. The past decade has seen the establishment of about 15 fish farms producing both edible and ornamental fish in the Negev and Arava Deserts. Fish farming, meanwhile, has became more lucrative worldwide as people seek more fish in their diet for better health, and ocean fisheries increasingly are being depleted. The practice is not without critics, who say it can harm the environment and the fish. In Israel there was a decision by the government to stop fish fanning in the Red Sea near the southern city of Eilat by 2008 because it was deemed damaging to nearby coral reefs. Some also argue that the industry is not sustainable in the long term because most of the fish that are fanned are carnivorous and must be fed a protein-rich diet of other fish, usually caught in the wild. Another criticism is that large numbers of fish are kept in relatively small areas, leading to a higher risk of disease. Professor Appelbaum said the controversy surrounding fish farming in ocean areas does not apply to desert aquaculture, which is in an isolated, controlled area, with much less competition for resources.

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

单选题 {{I}}Questions 14 to 16 are based on an introduction to a video phone. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.{{/I}}

单选题Professor Thring expects that the Coal Board will ______.

单选题The Village Green in New Milford, Connecticut, is a snapshot of New England charm: a carefully manicured lawn flanked by scrupulously maintained colonial homes. Babysitters dandle kids in the wooden gazebo, waiting for commuter parents to return from New York. On a lazy afternoon last week Caroline Nicholas, 16, had nothing more pressing to do than drink in the early-summer sunshine and discuss the recent events in town. " I don"t think a lot of older people knew there were unhappy kids in New Milford," she said, "I could see it coming. " In a five-day period in early June eight girls were brought to New Milford Hospital after what hospital officials call suicidal gestures. The girls, all between 12 and 17, tried a variety of measures, including heavy doses of alcohol, over-the-counter medicines and cuts or scratches to their wrists. None was successful, and most didn"t require hospitalization ; but at least two attempts, according to the hospital, could have been vital. Their reasons seemed as mundane as the other happen-stances of suburban life. "I was just sick of it all," one told a reporter, "Everything in life." Most alarming, emergency-room doctor Frederick Lohse told a local reporter that several girls said they were part of a suicide pact. The hospital later backed away from this remark. But coming in the wake of at least sixteen suicide at- tempts over the previous few months, this sudden cluster—along with the influx of media—has set this well-groomed suburb of 23, 000 on edge. At a town meeting last Wednesday night, Dr Simon Sobo, chief of psychiatry at the hospital, told more than 200 parents and kids, "We"re talking about a crisis that has really gotten out of hand." Later he added, "There have been more suicide attempts this spring than I have seen in the 13 years I have been here. " Sobo said that the girls he treated didn"t have serious problems at home or school. "Many of these were popular kids," he said, "They got plenty of love, but beneath the reassuring signs, a swath of teens here are not making it." Some say that drugs, Both pot and "real drugs", are commonplace. Kids have shown up with LIFE SUCKS and LONG LIVE DEATH penned on their arms. A few girls casually display scars on their arms where they cut them- selves. "You"d be surprised how many kids try suicide," said one girl, 17. "You don"t want to put pain on other people; you put it on yourself." She said she used to cut herself "just to release the pain". Emily, 15, a friend of three of the girls treated in June, said one was having family problems, one was "upset that day" and the third was "just upset with everything else going on". She said they weren"t really trying to kill themselves—they just needed concern. As Sobo noted, "What"s going on in New Milford is not unique to New Milford. " The same underlying culture of despair could be found in any town. But teen suicide, he added, can be a "contagion". Right now New Milford has the bug—and has it bad.

单选题Earth scientists have come to understand that climate ______.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}} Read the following texts answer the questions accompany them by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} While it's true that just about every cell in the body has the instructions to make a complete human, most of those instructions are inactivated, and with good reason. The last thing you want is for your brain cells to start producing stomach acid or your nose to turn into a kidney. The only time cells truly have the potential to turn into any and all body parts is very early in a pregnancy, when so-called stem cells haven't begun to specialize. Yet this untapped potential could be a terrific boon to medicine. Most diseases involve the death of healthy cells-brain cells in Alzheimer's, cardiac cells in heart disease, pancreatic cells in diabetes, to name a few. If doctors could isolate stem cells, then direct their growth, they might be able to furnish patients with healthy replacement tissue. It was incredibly difficult, but last fall scientists at the University of Wisconsin managed to isolate stem cells and get them to grow into neural, muscle and bone cells. The process still can't be controlled, and may have unforeseen limitations. But if efforts to understand and master stem-cell development prove successful, doctors will have a therapeutic tool of incredible power. The same applies to cloning, which is really just the other side of the coin. True cloning, as first shown with Dolly the sheep two years ago, involves taking a developed cell and reactivating the genome within, resetting its developmental instructions to a pristine state. Once that happens, the rejuvenated cell can develop into a full-fledged animal, genetically identical to its parent. For agriculture, in which purely physical characteristics like milk production in a cow or low fat in a hog have real market value, biological carbon copies could become routine within a few years. This past year scientists have done for mice and cows what Ian Wilmut did for Dolly, and other creatures are bound to join the cloned menagerie in the coming year. Human cloning, on the other hand, may be technically feasible but legally and emotionally more difficult. Still, one day it will happen. The ability to reset body cells to a pristine, undeveloped state could give doctors exactly the same advantages they would get from stem cells: the potential to make healthy body tissues of all sorts, and thus to cure disease. That could prove to be a tree "miracle cure".

单选题Questions 4～6 are based on the following talk; listen and choose the best answer.

单选题The molecules of carbon dioxide in the Earth"s atmosphere affect the heat balance of the Earth by acting as a one-way screen. Although these molecules allow radiation at visible wavelengths, where most of the energy of sunlight is concentrated, to pass through, they absorb some of the longer-wavelength, infrared emissions radiated from the Earth"s surface, radiation that would otherwise be transmitted back into space. For the Earth to maintain a constant average temperature, such emissions from the planet must balance incoming solar radiation. If there were no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, heat would escape from the Earth much more easily. The surface temperature would be so much lower that the oceans might be a solid mass of ice. Today, however, the potential problem is too much carbon dioxide. The burning of fossil fuels and the cleaning of forests have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide by about 15 percent in the last hundred years and we continue to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Could the increase in carbon dioxide cause a global rise in average temperature, and could such a rise have serious consequences for human society? Mathematical models that allow us to calculate the rise in temperature as a function of the increase indicate that the answer is probably "yes". Under present conditions a temperature of -8℃ can be observed at an altitude of 5 to 6 kilometers above the Earth. Below this altitude (called the radiating level), the temperature increases by about 6℃ per kilometer approaching the Earth"s surface, where the average temperature is about 15℃. An increase in the amount of carbon dioxide means that there are more molecules of carbon dioxide to absorb infrared radiation. As the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb infrared radiation increase, the radiating level and the temperature of the surface must rise. One mathematical model predicts that doubling the atmosphere carbon dioxide would raise the global mean surface temperature by 2.5℃. This model assumes that the atmosphere"s relative humidity remains constant and the temperature decreases with altitude at a rate of 6.5℃ per kilometer. The assumption of constant relative humidity is important, because water vapor in the atmosphere is another efficient absorber of radiation at infrared wavelengths. Because warm air can hold more moisture than cool air, the relative humidity will be constant only if the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases as the temperature rises. Therefore, more infrared radiation would be absorbed and reradiated back to the Earth"s surface. The resultant warming at the surface could be expected to melt snow and ice, reducing the Earth"s reflectivity. More solar radiation would then be absorbed, leading to a further increase in temperature.

单选题How many new materials are mentioned in this passage?

单选题Farming emerged as a survival strategy because man had been obliged ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Paul Straussmann, retired vice president of Xerox, indicates in his book Information Pay-off that "almost half of the U. S. information workers are in executive, managerial, administrative and professional positions." He further states that "managers and professionals spend more than half of their time in communicating with each other." In other words, people are a corporation's most expensive resource. For a typical office, over 90 percent of the operating budget is for salaries, benefits and over head. With this investment, is it any wonder that managers are focusing more and more attention on employee productivity? They realize that the paper jungle cannot be tamed simply by hiring more people. To receive a return on their investment, wise corporate executive officers are realizing what industrialists and agriculturists learned long ago—efficient tools are essential for increased productivity. A direct relationship exists between efficient flow of information and the quality and speed of the output of the end product. For those companies using technology, the per document cost of information processing is only a fraction of what it was a few years ago. The decreasing cost of computers and peripherals (equipment tied to the computer) will continue to make technology a cost-effective tool in the future. An example of this type of savings is illustrated in the case of the Western Division of General Telephone and Electronics Company (GTE). By making a one-time investment of $10 million to automate its facilities, management estimates an annual saving of $8.5 million for the company. This savings is gained mainly through the elimination of support people once needed for proposal projects. Through a telecommunications network that supports 150 computer terminals with good graphics capabilities, the engineers who conceptualize the projects are now direct participants. They use the graphics capacities of the computer rather than rely on drafters to prepare drawings, they enter their own text rather than employ typists, and they use the network to track project progress rather than conducting meetings.

单选题Scholars and students have always been travelers. The official case for "academic mobility" is now often stated in impressive terms as a fundamental necessity for economic and social progress in the world, and debated in the corridors of Europe, but it is certainly nothing new. Serious students were always ready to go abroad in search of the most stimulating teachers and the most famous academies; in search of the purest philosophy, the most effective medicine, the likeliest road to gold. Mobility of this kind meant also mobility of ideas, their transference across frontiers, their simultaneous impact upon many groups of people. The point of learning is to share it, either with students or with colleagues. One presumes that only eccentrics have no interest in being credited with a startling discovery, or a new technique. It must also have been reassuring to know that other people in other parts of the world were about to make the same discovery or were thinking along the same lines, and that one was not quite alone, confronted by inquisition, ridicule or neglect. In the 20th century, and particularly in the last 20 years, the old footpaths of the wandering scholars have become vast highways. The vehicle which has made this possible has of course been the airplane, making contact between scholars even in the most distant places immediately feasible, and providing for the very rapid transmission of knowledge. Apart from the vehicle itself, it is fairly easy to identify the main factors which have brought about the recent explosion in academic movement. Some of these are purely quantitative and require no further mention; there are far more centers of learning, and a far greater number of scholars and students. In addition, one must recognize the very considerable multiplication of disciplines, particularly in the sciences, which by widening the total area of advanced studies has produced an enormous number of specialists whose particular interests are precisely defined. These people would work in some isolation if they were not able to keep in touch with similar isolated groups in other countries.