单选题Most readers are drawn to the facetious stories of his recent novel.

单选题This book is about how these basic beliefs and values affect important sides of American life.

单选题Most good writers use every means ______ to make the reader's way smooth and easy. A. at their disposal B. at their request C. at their will D. at their convenience

单选题I cannot thank you very much for your kindness, I owe my success to you.

单选题{{U}}No thing{{/U}} fuels cynicism for watching two titanic institutions wrangle over their reputations.

单选题She had just______the shell of the hard-boiled egg and was starting to peel it off. A. snapped B. cracked C. fractured D. burst

单选题St. Patrick"s Day is celebrated on March 17, his religious feast day and the anniversary of his death in the fifth century. Legend has it that this patron saint had given a sermon from a hilltop that drove all the snakes from Ireland. He also used the three-leafed shamrock to represent the Trinity— how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit could all exist as separate elements of the same entity— and converted the pagans to Christianity. The Irish have observed this day as a religious holiday for hundreds of years. People wear green in memory of the Emerald Isle and wear shamrocks. The first St. Patrick"s Day parade, however, took place not in Ireland, but in the United States. Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched through New York City on March 17, 1762. Along with their music, the parade helped the soldiers, as well as fellow Irishmen serving in the English army, to reconnect with their Irish roots. Over the next thirty-five years, Irish patriotism among American immigrants flourished , prompting the rise of so-called "Irish Aid" societies, like the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick and the Hibernian Society. Each group would hold annual parades featuring bagpipes ( which actually first became popular in the Scottish and English armies) and drums. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, most Irish immigrants in America were members of the Protestant middle class. When the Great Potato Famine hit Ireland in 1845, close to a million poor, uneducated, Catholic Irish began to pour into America to escape starvation. Despised for their religious beliefs and funny accents by the American Protestant majority, the immigrants had trouble finding even menial jobs. When Irish Americans in the country"s cities took to the streets on St. Patrick"s Day to celebrate their heritage, newspapers portrayed them in cartoons as drunk, violent monkeys. However, the Irish soon began to realize that their great numbers endowed them with a political power that had yet to be exploited. They started to organize, and their voting block, known as the "green machine", became an important swing vote for political hopefuls. Suddenly, annual St. Patrick"s Day parades became a show of strength for Irish Americans, as well as a must-attend event for a slew of political candidates. In 1948, President Truman attended New York City"s St. Patrick"s Day parade, a proud moment for the many Irish whose ancestors had to fight stereotypes and racial prejudice to find acceptance in America.

单选题One out of five bridges in the United States is outmoded .

单选题 A federal judge on Monday certified a $200 billion class action lawsuit against the tobacco industry for its marketing of light cigarettes. Eastern District of New York Judge Jack B. Weinstein's 540-page opinion in Schwab v. Philip Morris USA, Inc., 04-CIV-1945—which included an additional 965 pages of appendices for a total of 1,505 pages—gave tens of millions of smokers an avenue to recover damages from the nation's largest tobacco companies, including Philip Morris USA Inc., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Lorillard Tobacco Co., and Liggett Group, Inc. The class will include anyone who purchased light cigarettes from the time tobacco companies began selling them in the 1970s. The judge said he even would consider broadening the class, to encompass smokers of all "low tar" brands, not just light cigarettes. The judge suggested that an expansion of the class could assist the parties in negotiating {{U}}a global settlement{{/U}}. He set a trial date for January 22, 2007. The plaintiffs intend to seek treble damages. einstein has expressed skepticism about the plaintiffs' theory of damages, which alleges that light smokers were defrauded of billions because they believed they were buying a {{U}}product of greater value{{/U}} because of its health advantages. The judge also questioned the {{U}}size of the class{{/U}}, as well as the claim that as many as 90 percent of light cigarette smokers chose the cigarettes because they were less harmful. In his ruling Monday, the judge stressed that while the suit was far from perfect, the evidence was sufficient. He said the jury system—which he described as the "ultimate focus group of the law"—was well equipped to sort out the {{U}}particulars{{/U}} in accordance with Amendment Ⅶ of the U.S. Constitution. Weinstein declined to grant an interlocutory appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Theodore M. Grossman of {{U}}Jones Day{{/U}} in Cleveland, which represents R.J. Reynolds, said the defendants would seek a stay and appeal the class certification under Rule 23(f)of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

单选题Peter was seen crying when he came out of the office. We can deduce that he must have been punished.

单选题The author mentions "outer space" underlined in Paragraph 1 because ______.

单选题 In this section you will find after each of the passages a number of questions or unfinished statements about the passage, each with 4 (A, B, C and D) choices to complete the statement. You must choose the one which you think fits best. Blacken the corresponding letter as required on your Machine-scoring ANSWER SHEET. The time for this section is 70 minutes. Questions 51-55 are based on the following passage. To Err is Human by Lewis Thomas Everyone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped from $ 379 into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people with crazy sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that they're turning everything off, that sort of thing. If you manage to get in touch with someone and complain, you then get instantaneously typed, guilty letters from the same computer, saying, "Our computer was in error, and an adjustment is being made in your account." These are supposed to be the sheerest, blindest accidents. Mistakes are not believed to be the normal behavior of a good machine. If things go wrong, it must be a personal, human error, the result of fingering, tampering a button getting stuck, someone hitting the wrong key. The computer, at its normal best, is infallible. I wonder whether this can be true. After all, the whole point of computers is that they represent an extension of the human brain, vastly improved upon but nonetheless human, superhuman maybe. A good computer can think clearly and quickly enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even been programmed to write obscure verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides. It is not yet known whether a computer has its own consciousness, and it would be hard to find out about this. When you walk into one of those great halls now built for the huge machines, and standing listening, it is easy to imagine that the faint, distant noises are the sound of thinking, and the turning of the spools gives them the look of wild creatures rolling their eyes in the effort to concentrate, choking with information. But real thinking, and dreaming, are other matters. On the other hand, the evidence of something like an unconscious, equivalent to ours, are all around, in every mail. As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities.

单选题Sometimes style, especially in literature, is contrasted with "plain, everyday language." In using such plain, unmarked types of speaking or writing, however, one is no less choosing a particular style, even though it is the most commonly used one and the most neutral in that it conveys and ______ the least emotional involvement or personal feelings.

单选题Although "naming rights" have proliferated in American higher education for the past several decades, the phenomenon has recently expanded to extraordinary lengths. Anything to get an extra dollar out of donors is fair game. I know colleges and universities sorely need to raise funds in these times of fiscal constraints , but things have gotten a bit out of hand. Universities and colleges have long been named after donors-think of Harvard, Yale, Brown, and many others. John Harvard would hardly get a bench named after him today, given the modesty of his gift of books for the library back in the seventeenth century. Now it takes much more to get one"s name on a college. One institution, Rowan University of New Jersey, changed its name (from Glassboro State College) not long ago when a large donation was made. Buildings, too, have been affected. Traditionally, they were named after people such as distinguished scholars or visionary academic leaders; now they"re often named after big donors. Why is all of this happening now? The main motivation for the naming frenzy is, of course, to raise money. Donors love to see their names, or the names of their parents or other relatives, on buildings, schools, institutions, professorships, and the like. Increasingly, corporations and other businesses also seek to benefit from having their names on educational facilities. Today, no limits seem to exist on what can be named. If something does not have a name, it is up for grabs—a staircase, a pond, or a parking garage. Once all the major facilities have titles, lesser things go on the naming auction block. Colleges and universities, public and private, are all under increased pressure to raise money, and naming brings in cash. It is unproductive. Separate branding weakens the focus and mission of an institution and perhaps even its broader reputation. It confuses the public, including potential students, and feeds the idea that the twenty-first-century university is simply a confederation of independent entrepreneurial domains. The trends we see now in the United States, and perhaps tomorrow in other countries, will inevitably weaken the concept of the university as an institution that is devoted to the search for truth and the transmission of knowledge. All this naming distracts from the mission of an institution that has almost a millennium of history and cheapens its image. It is a sad symbol indeed of the commercialization and entrepreneurialism of the contemporary university.

单选题It is said that science has become too complex to acknowledge the existence of universal troths.

单选题 Freudian theory indeed took western 20th-century civilization by storm. How so? The answer lies in four factors. Of Freud's powers as a writer and advocate of ideas, and as a possessor of an extraordinary ability to weave together medical knowledge, some genuine insights into the human condition and a powerful imagination, there can be no question. He has the narrative skills of a first-rate novelist, and a knack for devising striking ways to describe the psychological phenomena he studies. His marvelous powers of imagination fed on analogy and metaphor, and annexed the austere terminologies of scientific medicine and psychology to them. This gave them authority. His case studies are highly organized narratives constructed from true-life gossip based on voyeurism—irresistible to human curiosity. The second attraction—that Freud offers each individual a revelation of secrets about himself that he does not himself know—is equally irresistible. The same compound of insecurity and curiosity, anxiety and desire that makes so many resort against their better judgment to fortune-tellers, is at work here; except that here the imprimatur of science makes the proceeding respectable, which is why people will spend far more on their analysts than on their astrologers. The third attraction is the promised theory of human nature. Religious accounts of fallen man, of humanity as midway between beast and angel, of imperishable souls trapped in disgusting matter and therefore sinful from birth, had lost their grip with many, while at the same time Darwinian views offered no account of why evolution had made man as he is. In identifying sexual and aggressive impulses as the fundamental human drives, and in specifying their causes, Freud offered an inclusive philosophical psychology. Humans struggle with conceptual bewilderments about themselves and their complex natures; one can see why the appearance of Freud's magisterial new insights seemed as welcome as rain in drought. And finally there is the fact that sex lies at. the core of the stow. Freud performed a great service by liberating debate on the matter, but it is questionable whether the importance he assigns it is correct. The hungry always think of food; the fed put eating in its proper place. The accidents of social history are easily mistaken for the essentials of human nature. The surprise is that people do not see how, at most, sex can only be part of a far more complicated story. From Animism to Zoroastrianism, every view known to man retains at least a few devotees. There might always be Freudians, and there will always be admirers of Freud's great imaginative and literary powers; these two, as the foregoing remarks suggest, are intimately linked. But as to Freud's claims upon troth, the judgment of time seems to be running against him.

单选题His self-control was such that even faced with the shower of cursory words from his wife, he remained ______. A. imperturbable B. indefatigable C. ineffable D. implacable

单选题Because of the economic crises, many graduating students have to be ______ the pavemenmts for a job even before graduation.

单选题It was one of those days when it looked at first something interesting could happen, but then later, when you didn't expect anything, almost everything happened.

单选题A trip to the Antarctic is reasonably safe if you take the necessary precautions. A. within reason B. rather C. beyond doubt D. doubly