单选题Whatdoesthemando?A.Ataxi-driver.B.Abusdriver.C.Apoliceman.D.Atouristguide.

单选题Questions 14 to 16 are based on the talk about the changing of world population.

单选题 Opinion polls are now beginning to show a reluctant consensus that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely. But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm? Should 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 neighbourhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centres 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 coming 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 offer 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 transport 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 places in which they lived. Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. In pre-industrial times, 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 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 utopian 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 17 to 20 are based on the following news report. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.

单选题According to the passage, which of the statements is NOT true?

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} No people doubt the fundamental importance of mothers in childrearing, but what do fathers do? Much of what they contribute is simply being the second adult in the home. Bringing up children is demanding, stressful and exhausting. Two adults can support and make up for each other's deficiencies and build on each other's strength. As we all know, fathers also bring an array of unique qualities. Some are familiar: protector and role model. Teen age boys without fathers are notoriously prone to trouble. The pathway to adulthood for daughters is somewhat easier, but they must still learn from their fathers, in ways they cannot from their mothers, such as how to relate to men. They learn from their fathers about heterosexual trust, intimacy and difference. They learn to appreciate their own femininity from the one male who is most special in their lives. Most important, through loving and being loved by their fathers, they learn that they are love-woruhy. Current research gives much deeper—and mole surprising insight into the father's role in child rearing. One significantly overlooked dimension of fathering is play. From their children's birth through adolescence, fathers tend to emphasize game more than caretaking. The father's style of play is likely to be both physically stimulating and exciting. With older children it involves more teamwork, requiring competitive testing of physical and mental skills. It frequently resembles a teaching relationship: come on, let me show you how. Mothers play more at the child's level. They seem willing to let the child directly play. Kids, at least in the early years, seem to prefer to play with daddy. In one study of 21/2(下标)-year-olds who were given a choice, more than two-thirds chose to play with their fathers. The way fathers' play has effects on everything from the management of emotions to intelligence and academic achievement. It is of particular importance in promoting self-control. According to one expert, "children who roughhouse with their fathers quickly learn that biting, kicking and other forms of physical violence are not acceptable." They learn when to "shut it down". At play and in other realms, fathers tend to lay stress on competition, challenge, initiative, risk-taking and independence. Mothers, as caretakers, stress emotional security and personal safety. On the playground fathers often try to get the child to swing ever higher, while mothers are cautious, worrying about an accident. We know, too, that fathers' involvement seems to be linked to enhanced verbal and problem-solving skills and higher academic achievement. Several studies found that along with paternal strictness, the amount of time fathers spent reading with them was a strong predictor of their daughters' verbal ability. For sons the results have been equally striking. Studies uncovered a strong relationship between fathers' involvement and the mathematical abilities of their sons. Other studies found a relationship between paternal nurturing and boys' verbal intelligence.

单选题The population of the world today is about______ .

单选题A mystery over what caused the brightest supernova ever observed finally appears to have been solved. Two astronomers in the Netherlands say the explosion was the result of a cosmic pileup: dozens of massive stars crashing into each other, producing a monstrous heavyweight star that eventually exploded, leaving a giant black hole in its wake. Supernova 2006gy burst into view in September 2006 in a distant galaxy, 240 million light years away. The blast was 100 times more powerful than a normal supernova, suggesting the exploding star weighed in at more than a hundred times the mass of the Sun. But astronomers found a puzzling detail in their observations: the supernova debris contained large amounts of hydrogen, which they would not have expected for such a massive star: It should have shed its outer hydrogen layers at an earlier stage. Although several possible explanations have been put forward to explain the massive blast— including the formation of a quark star and the production of huge quantities of antimatter—no single theory could easily explain all of the observations. Now, in the journal Nature, Simon Portegies Zwart and Edward van den Heuvel of the University of Amsterdam say 2006gy may have been the result of a multiple-star collision in a dense stellar cluster. They say dozens of stars—some of them hydrogen-rich—collided to form a giant weighing in at over 100 Suns. Unable to support its own weight, the colossus blew itself to smithereens in an explosion that outshone its home galaxy. Computer simulations reveal that multiple collisions are quite likely in very dense star clusters. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains two such superdense clusters (the Arches cluster and the Quintuplet cluster), close to its centre. Indeed, supernova 2006gy also occurred close to the core of its host galaxy. If Portegies Zwart and van den Heuvel are right, the dense cluster of stars should become visible once the supernova has faded sufficiently. This should happen a few years from now, they say. There may be another explanation for the brightness of the supernova, however. In the same issue of Nature, Stan Woosley of the University of California at Santa Cruz and his colleagues show how multiple explosions in a single, very massive star could account for 2006gy's behaviour. In this model, every explosion produces an expanding shell of material. When new ejecta catches up and collides with an older shell, so much energy is released that the result will look like an over-luminous supernova. "One could, I suppose, make our massive star by merging smaller ones," Woosley said, "but that was not part of our model and does not seem necessary." According to Woosley's calculations, the star may not yet have collapsed into a black hole. A new explosion might happen in about 10 years or so, he says.

单选题Text 2 For the past six years, crime rates have been falling all over America. In some big cities, the fall has been extraordinary. Between 1993 and 1997 in New York city violent crime fell by 39% in central Harlem and by 45% in the once-terrifying South Bronx. The latest figures released by the FBI, for 1997, show that serious crime continued to fall in all the larger cities, though a little more slowly than in 1996. Violent crime fell by 5% in all and by slightly more in cities with over 250,000 people. Property crimes have fallen, too, by more than 20% since 1980, so that the rates for burglary and car-theft are lower in America than they are in supposedly more law-abiding Britain and Scandinavia. And people have noticed. In 1994, 31% of Americans told pollsters that crime was the most important challenge facing the country, while in 1997, only 14% thought so. Some cities' police departments are so impressed by these figures, it is said, that they have lately taken to exaggerating the plunge in crime. Why this has happened is anyone's guess. Many factors — social, demographic, economic, and political — affect crime rate, so it is difficult to put a finger on the vital clue. In March this year, the FBI itself admitted it had "no idea" why rates were falling so fast. Politicians think they know, of course. Ask Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York, why his city has made such strides in beating crime that it accounts for fully a quarter of the national decline. He will cite his policy of "zero tolerance". This concept, which sprang from a famous article by two criminologists in Atlantic Monthly in March 1982, maintains that by refusing to tolerate tiny infractions of the law — dropping litter, spray — painting walls — the authorities can create a climate in which crime of more dangerous kinds finds it impossible to flourish. The Atlantic article was called "Broken Windows"; if one window in a building was left broken, it argued, all the others would soon be gone. The answer: mend the window, fast. The metro system in Washington, D.C was the first place where zero tolerance drew public attention, especially when one passenger was arrested for eating a banana. The policy seemed absurdly pernickety, yet it worked: in a better environment, people's behavior improved, and crime dropped. Mr. Giuliani, taking this theme to heart, has gone further. He has cracked down on windscreen-cleaners, public urinates, graffiti, and even jaywalkers. He has excoriated New York's famously sullen cabdrivers, and wants all New Yorkers to be nicer to each other. Tony Blair, visiting from London, has been hugely impressed. But is this cleanliness and civility the main reason why crime has fallen? It seems unlikely "Zero tolerance" can also be a distraction, making too many policemen spend too much time handing out littering tickets and parking fines while, some streets away, young men are being murdered for their trainers. It is localized, too: though lower Manhattan or the Washington metro can show the uncanny orderliness of a communist regime, other parts of the city — the areas of highest crime maybe left largely untreated. William Bratton, New York's police commissioner until Mr. Giuliani fired him for stealing his thunder, has a different explanation for the fall in crime. It came about mostly, he believes, because he reorganized the police department and restored its morale: giving his officers better guns, letting them take more decisions for themselves, and moving them away from desk jobs and out into the struts. Mr. Bratton made his precinct commanders personally responsible for reducing crimes on their own beats. There was no passing the buck, and those who failed were fired. Within a year, he had replaced half of them.

单选题What did the author feel about being rejected by her dates?

单选题Have you heard about the book which pushes blood types as determining whether somebody should be vegetarian or not? The idea of choosing foods based on your blood type was popularized by Peter J. D'Adamo, ND, in his book, Eat Right For Your Type (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1996). D'Adamo, a naturopath, proposes that those who have blood type A should be vegetarian, while those with blood type O must eat meat and eliminate wheat and some other grains. He says that following the correct diet for your blood type will help you maintain optimal health and weight, avoid many infections, and fight back against life-threatening illnesses. Is there any truth to his claims? While D'Adamo spends more than 350 pages explaining the minute details of the foods, supplements, medications, and exercise regimens which should be followed by people with each blood type, he fails to scientifically document the effectiveness of his recommendations. Many of the claims which he makes are not backed up by published research. For example, depending on your blood type, you are presented with detailed lists of foods which are highly beneficial, neutral, or to be avoided. How were these lists generated? Has any research been published showing adverse health effects from use of foods which should be avoided? No studies are presented which support what appear to be the author's speculations. Numerous studies have shown that vegetarians live longer than non-vegetarians and have a lower risk of a number of chronic diseases. These studies are likely to be based on people from all blood type groups. It certainly seems that a vegetarian diet has benefits for those studied, regardless of their blood type. Similarly, studies like those of Dean Ornish appear to demonstrate the beneficial effect of a vegetarian diet and other lifestyle changes on a number of individuals, and not just those of a certain blood type. Eat Right For Your Type should not be used as the basis for dietary change. Statements like "I could never be a vegetarian, I'm type O" are not based on scientific evidence and may even lead people to avoid making dietary changes which could benefit both their health and the health of our planet. Our advice? Stick with a varied, whole foods-based vegetarian diet regardless of your blood type.

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

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单选题What does the author say about the ordinary people in the Third World countries?

单选题On the 36th day after they had voted, Americans finally learned Wednesday who would be their next president: Governor George W. Bush of Texas. Vice President A1 Gore, his last realistic avenue for legal challenge closed by a U. S. Supreme Court decision late Tuesday, planned to end the contest formally in a televised evening speech of perhaps 10 minutes, advisers said. They said that Senator Joseph Lieberman, his vice presidential running mate, would first make brief comments. The men would speak from a ceremonial chamber of the Old Executive office Building, to the west of the White House. The dozens of political workers and lawyers who had helped lead Mr. Gore's unprecedented fight to claw a come-from-behind electoral victory in the pivotal state of Florida were thanked Wednesday and asked to stand down. "The vice president has directed the recount committee to suspend activities," William Daley, the Gore campaign chairman, said in a written statement. Mr. Gore authorized that statement after meeting with his wife, Tipper, and with top advisers including Mr. Daley. He was expected to telephone Mr. Bush during the day. The Bush campaign kept a low profile and moved gingerly, as if to leave space for Mr. Gore to contemplate his next steps. Yet, at the end of a trying and tumultuous process that had focused world attention on sleepless vote counters across Florida, and on courtrooms from Miami to Tallahassee to Atlanta to Washington the Texas governor was set to become the 43rd U.S. president. The news of Mr. Gore's plans followed the longest and most rancorous dispute over a U.S. presidential election in more than a century, one certain to leave scars in a badly divided country. It was a bitter ending for Mr. Gore, who had outpolled Mr. Bush nationwide by some 300,000 votes, but, without Florida, fell short in the Electoral College by 271 votes to 267—the narrowest Electoral College victory since the turbulent election of 1876. Mr. Gore was said to be distressed by what he and many Democratic activists felt was a partisan decision from the nation's highest court. But at the end of five seemingly endless weeks, during which the physical, legal and constitutional machines of the U. S. election were pressed and sorely tested in ways unseen in more than a century, the system finally produced a result, and one most Americans appeared to be willing at lease provisionally to support. The Bush team welcomed the news with an outward show of restraint and aplomb. The governor's hopes had risen and fallen so many times since Election night, and the legal warriors of each side suffered through so many dramatic reversals, that there was little energy left for celebration.

单选题When the lions go out hunting for food, the males usually______ .

单选题In January 1995, the world witnessed the emergence of a new international economic order with the launching of the World Trade Organization. The WTO, which succeeds the GATT, is expected to strengthen the world trading system and to be more effective than the GATT in governing international trade in goods and services in many aspects. First, trade liberalization all over the world is expected to increase via the dramatic reductions in trade barriers to which the members of the WTO are committed. Under the WTO, members are required to reduce their tariff and non-tariffs on manufacturing goods. In addition, protecting domestic agricultural sectors from foreign competition will become awfully difficult in the" new WTO system. Second, rules and regulations governing international trade will be more strongly enforced. Under the old system of the GATT, there were many cases where trade measures, such as anti-dumping and countervailing duties, were intentionally used solely for protectionist reasons. The WTO's strengthened rules and regulations will significantly reduce the abusing of such trade measures by its member countries. The WTO is also equipped with an improved dispute settlement mechanism. Accordingly, we expect to see a more effective resolution of trade disputes among the member countries in this new trade environment. Third, new multilateral rules have been established to cover areas which the GATT did not address, such as international trade in services and the protection of intellectual property rights. There still remain a number of problems that need to be resolved before international trade in services can be completely liberalized, and newly-developed ideas or technologies are fairly compensated. However, just the establishment of multilateral rules in these new areas is a distinguished contribution to the progress toward a global tree trade system. Along with the launching of the WTO, this new era in world trade is characterized by a change in the structure of the world economy. Today, a world-wide market for goods and services is rapidly replacing a world economy composed of relatively isolated national markets. Domestic financial markets have been integrated into a truly global system, and the multinational corporation is becoming a principal mechanism for allocating investment capital and determining the location of production sites throughout much of the world.

单选题Most people are right-handed and children usually have the same handedness as their parents. This suggests that genes are at work. But identical twins have identical genes, so genes cannot be the whole story. Cultural attitudes seem to have played an important part in the development of hand preferences. In the past, left-handers have suffered anything from teasing to flogging. Even today in some countries enforced right-handedness, particularly for writing and eating, is still common. To explain the observed patterns of handedness, researchers have devised what is known as a 'gene-culture coevolution' model. The initial assumption of the model-drawn from observation of non-human primates and other mammals such as mice is that early on in human evolution, the genetic make-up of individuals inclined them to prefer one hand or the other, but that the population was equally divided between right- and left-handed people. Over time, according to the model, the interaction of genes and culture has produced a state where everyone has identical genes for handedness. This would happen if, for whatever reason, right-handers were more likely to survive and reproduce. The idea may not be that far-fetched. Many biologists believe that handedness is related to brain structure--say for example, early right-handers may have been better at language. The model predicts that today everyone has genes which confer a basic predisposition of 78% to be right-handed. How children actually turn out, however, can be influenced by whether their parents are dextral or sinistral. For example, children may mimic their parents. Or parents may influence the handedness of their children in the way that they hand them toys or food. The researchers reckon that a child with two right-handed parents has a 91% probability of being right-handed; a child with two left-handed parents has a probability of only 63% of being right-handed. But parental influence does not account for everything. Random events during a child's development can also have a small effect on handedness. Even if identical twins have parents who are both dextral, factors such as their position in the womb may result in the twins not preferring the same hands. The model seems plausible. It accurately predicts the results of 13 studies of the handedness of twins as well as the proportion of left-handers found in the population at large (roughly 12%, a figure that seems to be quite stable). Asymmetries in early tools, and in the way in which prey were clubbed, suggest that hominids as early as the Australopithecines may have preferred their right hands. Whatever the origin of this dextrous preference, though, left-handers remain at large. Some people are just sinister.

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 plane may begin to seriously threaten growth.