单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} When investors get twitchy, developing countries are usually the first to pay the price. The current sell-off may be even more dangerous because it follows a recent bout of exuberance. It is possible that some emerging markets could be among the worst casualties of the latest wave of risk aversion. In particular, it is time to worry about some of the beneficiaries of the "carry trade". The trade assumes that markets are irrational. Investors who succumb to its lure borrow in low-yielding currencies and invest in higher-yielding assets. In theory, the long-term expected return from a currency carry trade should be zero, since the assets should only be offering a higher yield because of their higher risk. In practice, however, investors have been making money from the carry trade for years. This may well be due to the "Great Moderation" in the world economy. In many countries both growth and inflation have been more stable than expected. Economies with a poor inflation record have thus tended to overcompensate investors for the risk they have taken. But the carry trade has also allowed some countries to get away with economic policies that they might never have dreamed of in the 1980s. Latvia and Iceland have been running current- account deficits of 25-30% of GDP without suffering a currency crisis. Turkey has been another beneficiary. Its current-account deficit has not hit the Icelandic extreme hut, at around 7.5% of GDP, it is still a gaping hole. However, short-term interest rates of 18.7% have encouraged investors to take the risk of buying the currency; the lira has risen 18% against the dollar in the past year. A strong currency has encouraged Turkish companies to borrow abroad. Were the lira to collapse, the cost of repaying dollar-denominated debts would be, a big burden for Turkish companies. Currency strength is also the "wrong" response to Turkey's current-account deficit because it will make the country's exports less competitive. As a result, some economists reckon the deficit may head towards 10% of GDP during the second half of this year. Until recently, markets have been reluctant to punish Turkey for its dodgy economic fundamentals, perhaps hoping it will be a long-term winner if it manages to pull off greater integration with Europe's economies. Neil Shearing, an emerging-Europe economist, reckons that Turkish bonds ought to trade at a premium of nearly three percentage points to Treasury bonds, rather than their current two-point spread. However, investors may at last be opening their eyes to the risks in Turkey. Turkey may have been helped by the perception that, because many emerging markets have improved their economic positions, all of them are less risky. Emerging-market bond spreads reached a record low of around one-and-a-half percentage points in June. When investors were only getting 6% for lending money to investment backwaters such as Peru, a 6.7% yield from Turkey must have looked like a bargain. But it is in the nature of emerging markets that, every so often, they kick investors in the teeth. This looks like being one of those moments. Of course, within 12 months, investors are bound to be back, their smiles expensively restored, Fast economic growth and high yields are just too alluring.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Many things make people think artists are weird. But the weirdest may be this: artists' only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, phony or, worst of all, boring, as we went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modem times have seen so much misery. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modem form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just all ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a {{U}}bummer{{/U}} too. Today the messages the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and for ever happy Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda -- to lure us to open our wallets -- they make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. But what we forget -- what our economy depends on us forgetting -- is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need art to tell us, as religion once did, Me mento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.

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单选题In the third paragraph, Dr. Laragh implies that

单选题{{I}}Questions 11 ～ 13 are based on the following talk. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 ～ 13.{{/I}}

单选题In the immediate post-war years, the city of Birmingham scheduled some 50,000 small working class cottage as slums due for demolition. Today that process is nearly complete. Yet it is clear that, quite apart from any question of race, an environmental problem remains. The expectation built into the planning policies of 1945 was that in the foreseeable future the city would be a better place to live in. But now that slum clearance has run its course, there seems to be universal agreement that the total environment where the slums once stood is more depressing than ever. For the past ten years the slum clearance areas have looked like bomb sites. The buildings and places survived on islands in a sea of rubble and ash. When the slums were there they supported an organic community life and each building, each activity, fitted in as part of the whole. But now that they have been destroyed, nothing meaningful appears to remain, or rather those activities which do go on do not seem to have any meaningful relation to the place. They happen there because it is an empty stage which no one is using any more. Typical of the inner-city in this sense is the Birmingham City Football Ground. Standing in unsplendid isolation on what is now wasteland on the edge of Small Heath, it brings into the area a stage army on twenty or so Saturdays a year who come and cheer and then go away again with little concern any more for the place where they have done their cheering. Even they, however, have revolted recently. "The ground," says the leader of the revolt, "is a slum", thus putting his finger on the fact that the demolition of houses creats rather than solves problems of the inner-city. A new element has now come upon the scene in the inner-city in the form of the tower block. Somehow it doesn''t seem to be what Le Corbusier and the planners who wrote those post-war Pelicans intended. The public spaces either haven''t yet been developed or are more meanly conceived, and the corridors and lifts are places of horror. In fact these places were always suspected. They had no legitimacy in the minds of the public as suburban family housing had, and those who were placed there felt that they had been cheated. Along with the decaying elements, therefore, that which had been conceived as part of the brave new world was part of the problem.

单选题Questions 8--12 Complete the following sentences with NO MORE THAN three words for each blank.

单选题According to this article the trend toward early marriages

单选题{{I}} Questions 14 to 17 are based on the radio news. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 17.{{/I}}

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}} Read the following texts and answer the questions which accompany them by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. Text 1 "She was America's princess as much as she was Britain's princess," wrote the foreign editor of the normally sharp Chicago Tribune a week after the death in Paris of Diana, Princess of Wales. He was not far off the mark. For Americans have indeed taken posthumous possession of Britain's "People's Princess". What was happening? How was it that a nation whose school children are taught in history class to look down on the "tyranny" of the English monarchy, suddenly appeared so supportive of a member of the British royal family? Why was it that numerous American commentators sought to expand into touch the rumour that Diana had planned to move to the United States to live? Part of the answer lies in America's status as the celebrity culture par excellence. It is from their celebrities that many Americans derive their sense of nationhood. Their presidents must be celebrities in order to be elected. Writer and commentator Norman Mailer made the point after the last presidential election that Bill Clinton won because he projected the image of a Hollywood star, while Bob Dole lost because he came across as a supporting actor. What seems to have happened is that the inhabitants of the nation that produced Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley have found it almost impossible to accept that Princess Diana, the world's biggest, classiest contemporary celebrity by far, should have come from another country. Even that, many seemed to say to themselves, was merely an accident of birth; because in many ways she was so American. Her New Age preferences — the astrologers, the psychics, the aromatherapy — were closer to the style of former US First Lady Nancy Reagan than the House of Windsor. Her dieting and her visits to the gym were lifestyle options that were typically American. Her famous TV confession of adultery and her (purportedly unauthorized) tellall biography were also hallmarks of the American celebrity approach. Like another former First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, she auctioned her dresses — not in London or Paris, but New York. She visited America frequently and felt right at home there, revelling in the generous attentions of the rich and famous and delighting in the unreserved responsiveness of the public to her charms. For she seemed to have adapted brilliantly to another American invention: image manipulation, which all aspirants top olitical office in the US struggle to learn but which she appeared to have absorbed and refined naturally. She was, in short, a thoroughly modem woman and, like it or not, most of what is modern originates in the United States. But many Americans felt she also had more enduring qualities. Many viewed her as the incarnation of their country's dominant myth. As an editorial in the Miami Herald put it: "She was an American dream, a superstar Cinderella with the polish of a natural-born socialite ... In a way she fulfilled the American dream: to emerge from insignificance and overcome hardship and make something of herself." Elaine Showalter, a student of American popular culture who teaches English at Princet on University, noted the difference between the dullness of Prince Charles and Diana's "very American sensibility". "We have a sense here in America that anything is possible, that you are not a predetermined person; that if you are a woman from whom nothing is expected but you want to make your life count, you can do it. She shared that spirit and that's why she appealed so much to Americans."

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

单选题"Opinion" is a word that is often used carelessly today, It is used to refer to matters of taste, belief, anti judgment. This casual use would probably cause little confusion if people didn't attach too much importance to opinion. Unfortunately, most do attach great importance to it. "I have as much right to my opinion as you to yours," and "Everyone's entitled lo his opinion," are common expressions. In fact, anyone who would challenge another's opinion is likely to be branded intolerant. Is that label accurate? Is it intolerant to challenge another's opinion? It depends on what definition of opinion you have in mind. For example, you may ask a friend "What do you think of the new Buicks? "And he may reply, "In my opinion, they're ugly. "In this case, it would not only be intolerant to challenge his statement, but foolish. For it's obvious that by opinion he means his personal preference a matter of taste. And as the old saying goes, "It's pointless to argue about matters of taste. " But consider this very different use of the term. A newspaper reports that the Supreme Court has delivered its opinion in a controversial case. Obviously the justices did not stale their personal preferences, their mere likes and dislikes. They stated their considered judgment, painstakingly arrived at after thorough inquiry and deliberation. Most of what is referred to as opinion falls somewhere between these two extremes. It is not an expression of taste. Nor is it careful judgment. Yet it may contain elements of both. It is a view or belief more or less casually arrived at, with or without examining the evidence. Is everyone entitled to his opinion? Of course. In a free country this is not only permitted, but guaranteed. In Great Britain, for example, there is still a Flat Earth Society. As the name implies, the members of this organization believe that the earth is not spherical, but flat. In this country, too, each of us is free to take as creative a position as we please about any matter we choose. When the telephone operator announces That 11 be 95 ￠ for the first three minutes, you may respond "No, it won't—it'll be 28 ￠. "When the service station attendant notifies you "Your oil is down a quart, " you may reply " Wrong—it's up three. Being free to hold an opinion anti express it does not, of course, guarantee you favorable consequences. The operator may hang up on you. The service station attendant may threaten you with violence. Acting on our opinions carries even less assurance. Some time ago in California a couple took their eleven-year-old diabetic son to a faith healer. Secure in their opinion that the man had cured the boy, they threw away his insulin. Three days later the boy died. They remained unshaken in their belief, expressing the opinion that God would raise the boy from the dead. The police arrested them, charging them with manslaughter. The law in such matters is both clear and reasonable. We are free to act on our opinions only so long as, in doing so we do not harm others.

单选题It is a matter worthy of consideration, that the accounts of similar phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world, actually supply incidental proof of their own authenticity. Some years since, a question which brings out this point was put to me by a great historian: "How can a statement as to customs, myths, beliefs, etc., of a savage tribe be treated as evidence where it depends on the testimony of some traveler or missionary, who may be a superficial observer, more or less ignorant of the native language, a careless retailer of unfiltered talk, a man prejudiced or even willfully deceitful?" This question is, indeed, one which we ought to keep clearly and constantly in mind. Of course we are bound to use our best judgment as to the reliability of all authors we quote, and if possible to obtain several accounts to certify each point in each locality. But it is over and above these measures of precaution that the test of recurrence comes in. If two independent visitors to different countries, say a medieval Mohammedan in Tarytary and a modern Englishman in Dahome, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil and a Wesleyan in the Fiji Islands, agree in describing some analogous art or rite or myth among the people they have visited, it becomes difficult or impossible to set down such correspondence to accident or willful fraud. A story by someone who lived in the bush of Australia may, perhaps, be objected to as a mistake or an invention, but did a Methodist minister in Guinea conspire with him to cheat the public by telling the same story there? The possibility of intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands, by.two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears never to have heard of A. How distant are the countries, how wide apart the dates, how different the creeds and characters of the observers, in the catalogue of facts of civilisation, needs no farther showing to any one who will even glance at the footnotes of the present work. And the more odd the statement, the less likely that several people in several places should have made it wrongly. This being so, it seems reasonable to judge that the statements are in the main truly given, and that their close and regular coincidence is due to the accidental occurrence of similar facts in various districts of culture.

单选题On July 4, 1776, a secret meeting of insurgent colonists in America passed the Declaration of Independence. War against the British had already been going on for over a year, so the declaration came as the climax of years" stormy events in America. The impetus for the American Revolution was the treaty of Paris in 176a, which ended the struggle between the British and French for control over North America. Since the colonists no longer were frightened by the French, they ceased to rely upon the British for protection and were not as submissive as they were formerly. On the other hand, the British regarded the colonies as a source of revenue and began to impose unfair taxes upon them. The Sugar Act in 1764 and the Stamp Act in 1765 were so eagerly opposed by discontented colonists that rioting broke out. The Stamp Act was repealed in 1776 as a result of the riots. The British continued their policy of taxation without collaboration with their once obedient subjects. The Townshend Acts (a series of taxes on glass, lead, paper, and tea) created such disgust that the citizens of Boston attacked British soldiers who fired upon them. A new tea tax in 177a again consolidated Boston residents" disagreement. About fifty men disguised as Indians boarded British ships and got rid of their cargo of tea in protest against the tea tax. That was the famous Boston Tea Party. In reprisal, the British abolished the Bostonians" right to self-rule, and by passing what were referred to as Intolerable Acts in Boston, they infuriated all of the colonies and caused them to unite in protest. Representatives from twelve colonies gathered in Philadelphia in 1774 to plan a stratagem to avoid British interference in trade and to protest the infamy of taxation without representation. The British responded that the colonies were in rebellion, and, since nothing would soothe either side, both sides prepared for war.

单选题I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity can do strange things to people. It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn't been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don't mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left. Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—a potential to live, you might call it—which I didn't see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that. an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit. It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was mocking me and I was hurt. "I can't use this. " I said. "Take it with you," he urged me, "and roll it around. " The words stuck in my head. "Roll it around!" By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible.. playing baseball. At Philadelphia's Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball. All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start. It was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.

单选题WhatkindofanimalsisAnnaaskedtolookafter?A.Rabbits.B.Birds.C.Cats.D.Dogs.

单选题The modem world only recently reached the Yanomamo, a native people of the Amazon basin. Sheltered by thick rainforest, the Yanomano lived a self-contained existence until gold was discovered in their jungle homeland. Miners flocked into the forests, cutting down trees and bringing in disease and shot those Yanomamo who would not get out of the way. In just seven years from the early 1980s, the population fell 20 percent. Hands Around the World, a native American cultural association, says the Yanomamo are believed to be the most culturally intact people in the world. They wear loin cloths, use fire sticks and decorate their bodies with dye from a red berry (浆果). They don't use the wheel and the only metal they use is what has been traded to them by outsiders. When a Yanomamo dies, the body is burned and the remaining bones crushed into a powder and turned into a drink that is later consumed by mourners in memory of the dead. A Hands Around the World report says that in South America not only are the cultures and traditions in danger of disappearing, but some tribes are in danger of extinction. "The Yanomamo is a well-known tribe that is rapidly losing its members through the destruction of Western disease," the report says. Before illegal gold miners entered their rainforest, the Yanomamo were isolated from modern society. They occupy dense jungle north of the Amazon River between Venezuela and Brazil and are catalogued by anthropologists (人类学家) as neo-indians with cultural characteristics that date back more than 8,000 years. Each community lives in a circular communal house, some of which sleep up to 400, built around a central square. Though many Yanomamo men are monogamous, it is not unusual for them to have two or more wives. Anthropologists from the University of Wisconsin say polygamy is a way to increase one's wealth because having a large family increases help with hunting and cultivating the land. These marriages result in a shortage of women for other men to marry, which has led to inter-tribal wars. Each Yanomamo man is responsible for clearing his land for gardening, using slash-and-hum farming methods. They grow plantains, a type of banana, and hunt game animals, fish and anaconda (南美热带蟒蛇) using bows and arrows.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} People's attitude toward drugs has become to resemble an emotional roller coaster, careening wildly from dizzy heights of pharmacologic faith to gloomy terror over drug hazards. A host of dreaded killers that had tyrannized the world for centuries can now be cured. That is a cause for some to regard drugs as "miraculous". On the other hand, there are hundreds of pitifully deformed babies born of mothers who had taken thalidomide -- the very thought of them causes terror. What is the-sensible attitude toward drugs? I think the first thing to think about is the differences between drugs and wonder drugs. The antibiotics, such as penicillin, can really cure certain bacterial diseases. On the other hand, the major diseases threatening Americans today are cancer, stroke, hypertension, coronary disease, arthritis and psychoses. Against them, the doctor's bag of tricks is limited. He has no wonder drug. Of course, many patients suffering from these illnesses can be improved by taking drugs and a few can be dramatically helped. But no drug has cured a single case of schizophrenia or rheumatoid arthritis, in the way that penicillin can cure pneumonia or meningococcal meningitis. So the first important lesson is not to expect too much from drugs. Too many patients exert unholy pressures on doctors to prescribe for every symptom, even when such treatment is unwarranted or dangerous. Unfortunately, the medical profession is guilty of some complicity here The patient who demands a shot of penicillin for every sniffle and sneeze may be given the injection by a reluctant physician because he is certain that if he does not, the patient will search until he or she finds a doctor who will. More important, the physician is apt to be a willing collaborator in over-medication because he, too, has been oversold on drugs. He is rarely at a loss for a remedy that might be just what the patient needs. Doctors want their patients to get well. They also derive feelings of power and ego-satisfaction from the ability to pre- scribe the latest drugs. At the other extreme is the patient who is suspicious of all medications. In the category are the patients who never take an aspirin tablet because they believe that "every aspirin you take leaves a scar on the lining of your stomach". Without doubt, such ill-advised behavior is at times traceable to lurid accounts of drug dangers. Not long ago, when one antidepressant drug was temporarily withdrawn from the market by the Food and Drug Administration, radio and television stations in New York carried stories about that. Patients were advised by commentators not to take any medication at all. The resulting hysteria in hundreds of patients was as real as it was predictable.

单选题Questions 14～16 are based on the following conversation. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14～16.