单选题None of students in the class likes the mistress, who is used to being ______ of everything they do.

单选题He felt it rather difficult to take a stand ______ the opinion of the majority.

单选题The child's earliest words deal with concrete objects and actions, it is much later that he is able to grapple with ______. A. decisions B. abstractions C. opponents D. mathematics

单选题A proposed Russian ban on European Union meat exports could jeopardize Russia's aspirations to join the World Trade organization next year, the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, warned Friday. He warned that several of the 25 EU member states were growing weary of Russia's trade tactics and could move to block its WTO bid. He emphasized that the European Union supported Russia's WTO accession in principle and that he did not want to link the Russian meat ban to Russia's WTO prospects, though EU states could do so. In order to join the organization, Russia must reach agreement with each of the 149 WTO members. "Issues like this will affect the attitude of member states toward signing off on accession," Mandelson said. "This is not the only trade irritant between us and Russia—there are at least half a dozen—and this latest ban is bound to affect the attitude of member states," toward Russia's aim of joining the WTO. "We can't have so many of these trade irritants hanging over us. " Mandelson said he would work to get Russia to back off from its current plans to ban all EU animal products as of Jan. 1, which would affect C = $1.7 billion, or $ 2. 2 billion, in exports to Russia. Moscow has justified the ban on the grounds that Bulgaria and Romania, which will join the European Union on that day, do not have adequate food safety measures. But Mandelson warned that if Moscow refused to back down, it could sour overall trade relations with the European Union, which is already concerned about fair access to Moscow's energy resources. "Russia is acting in a disproportionate way," he said. President Vladimir Putin has made WTO membership one of his key economic objectives. He is keen to improve access to world markets for Russian exports and to provide a lift to the country's neglected agricultural sector. European resistance would add to reservations by trade negotiators in Washington who want Russia to make more progress on reducing tariffs on U. S. meat imports and protecting intellectual property before joining the world trade body. Trade disputes cast a shadow over the summit meeting, which was supposed to mark the start of talks on a partnership agreement between the European Union and Russia covering energy, trade and human rights. But Poland—in a separate dispute with Moscow over a Russian ban on Polish farm exports—used its veto to stop the talks on Friday. Putin defended the Russian ban after earlier complaining that the European Commission had failed to consult him before agreeing to admit Bulgaria and Romania, whose food safety practices he called into question. EU officials said privately that Putin's stance suggested he was suffering from a Cold War hangover because the former Soviet satellites will soon become EU members.

单选题Signs of deafness had given him great anxiety as early as 1798. For a long time he successfully concealed it from all but his most intimate friends, while he consulted physicians and quacks with eagerness. But neither quackery nor the best skill of his time availed him, and it has been pointed out that the root of the evil lay deeper than could have been supposed during his lifetime. Although his constitution was magnificently strong and his health was preserved by his passion for outdoor life, a post-mortem examination revealed a very complicated state of disorder, evidently dating from childhood (if not inherited) and aggravated by lack of care and good food. The touching document addressed to his brothers in 1802, and known as his "will" should be read in its entirety. No verbal quotation short of the whole will do justice to the overpowering outburst which runs in almost one long unpunctuated sentence through the whole tragedy of Beethoven's life, as he knew it then and foresaw it. He reproaches men for their injustice in thinking and calling him pugnacious, stubborn, and misanthropical when they do not know that for six years he has suffered from an incurable condition aggravted by incompetent doctors. He dwells upon his delight in human society from which he has had so early to isolate himself, but the thought of which now fills him with dread as it makes him realize his loss, not only in music but in all finer interchange of ideas, and terrifies him lest the cause of his distresses should appear. He declares that, when those near him had heard a flute or a singing shepherd while he heard nothing, he was only prevented from taking his life by the thougth of his art, but it seemed impossible for him to leave the world until he had brought out all that he felt to be in his power. He requests that after his death his present doctor , if surviving, shall be asked to describe his illness and to append it to this document in order that at least then the world may be as far as possible reconciled with him. He leaves his brothers property, such as it is, and in terms not less touching, if more conventional than the rest of the document, he declares that his experience shows that only virtue has preserved his life and his courage through all his misery. During the last twelve years of his life, his nephew was the cause of most of his anxiety and distress. His brother, Kaspar Karl, had often given him trouble—for example, by obtaining and publishing some of Beethoven's early indiscretions, such as the trio variations, op. 44, the sonatas, op. 49, and other trifles. In 1815, after Beethoven had quarreled with his oldest friend, Stephan Breuning, for warning him against trusting his brother in money matters, Kaspar died, leaving a widow of whom Beethoven strongly disapproved, and a son, nine years old, for the guardianship of whom Beethoven fought the widow through all the law courts. The boy turned out utterly unworthy of his uncle's persistent devotion and gave him every cause for anxiety. He failed in all his examinations, including an attempt to learn some trade in all his examinations, including an attempt to learn some trade in the polytechnic school, whereupon he fell into the hands of the police for attempting suicide, and after being expelled from Vienna, joined the army. Beethoven's utterly simple nature could neither educate nor understand a human being who was not possessed by the wish to do his best. His nature was passionately affectionate, and he had suffered all his life from the want of a natural outlet for it. He had often been deeply in love and made no secret of it. But Robert Browning had not a more intense dislike of "the artistic temperament" in morals, and though Beethoven's attachments were almost hopelessly above him in rank, there is not one that was not honorable and respected by society as showing the truthfulness and self-control of a great man. Beethoven's orthodoxy in such matters has provoked the smiles of Philistines, especially when it showed itself in his objections to Mozart's Don Giovanni and the grounds for selecting the subject of Fidelio for his own opera. The last thing that Philistines will ever understand is that genius is far too independent of convention to abuse it, and Beethoven's life, with all its mistakes, its grotesqueness, and its pathos, is as far beyond the shafts of Philistine wit as his art.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} Forget what Virginia Woolf said about What a writer needs-a room of one's own. The writer she had in mind wasn't at work on a novel in cyberspace, one with multiple hypertexts, animated graphics and downloads of trancey, chiming music. For that you also need graphic interfaces, ReslPlayer and maybe even a computer laboratory at Brown University. That was where Mark Amerika—his legally adopted name; don't ask him about his birth name-composed much of his novel Grammatron. But Grammatron isn't just a story. It's an online narrative (grammatron. com) that uses the capabilities of cyberspace to tie the conventional story line into complicated knots. In the four years it took to produce—it was completed in 1997—each new advance in computer software became another potential story device. "I became sort of dependent on the industry", jokes Amerika, who is also the author of two novels printed on paper." That's unusual for a writer, because if you just write on paper the" technology is pretty stable." Nothing about Grammatron is stable. At its center, if there is one, is Abe Golam, the inventor of Nanoscript, a quasi-mystical computer code that some unmystical corporations are itching to acquire. For much of the story, Abe wanders through Prague-23, a virtual "city" in cyberspace where visitors indulge in fantasy encounters and virtual sex, which can get fairly graphic. The reader wanders too, because most of Grammatron's 1,000-plus text screens contain several passages in hypertext. To reach the next screen, just double-click. But each of those hypertexts is a trapdoor that can plunge you down a different pathway of the story. Choose one and you drop into a corporate- strategy memo, Choose another and there's a XXX- rated sexual rant. The story you read is in some sense the story you make. Amerika teaches digital art at the University of Colorado, where his students develop works that straddle the lines between art, film and literature. "I tell them not to get caught up in mere plot," he says. Some avant-garde writers—Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino-have also experimented with novels that wander out of their author's control. "But what makes the Net so exciting," says Amerika, "is that you can add sound, randomly generated links, 3-D modeling, animation." That room of one's own is turning into a fun house.

单选题{{B}}Passage Four{{/B}} The crucial years of the Depression, as they are brought into historical focus, increasingly emerge as the decisive decade for American art, if not for American culture in general For it was during this decade that many of the conflicts which had blocked the progress of American art in the past came to a head and sometimes boiled over. Janus-faced, the thirties look backward, sometimes as far as the Renaissance; and at the same time forward, as far as the present and beyond. It was the moment when artists, like Thomas Hart Benton, who wished to turn back the clock to regain the virtues of simpler times came into direct conflict with others, like Stuart Davis and Frank Lloyd Wright, who were ready to come to terms with the Machine Age and to deal with its consequences. America in the thirties was changing rapidly. In many areas the past was giving way to the present, although not without a struggle. A predominantly rural and small town society was being replaced by the giant complexes of the big cities; power was becoming increasingly centralized in the federal government and in large corporations. As a result, traditional American types such as the independent farmer and the small businessman were being replaced by the executive and the bureaucrat. Many Americans, deeply attached to the old way of life, felt disinhereited. At the same time, as immigration decreased and the population became more homogeneous, the need arose in art and literature to commemorate the ethnic and regional differences that were fast disappearing. Thus, paradoxically, the conviction that art, at least, should serve some purpose or carry some message of moral uplift grew stronger as the Puritan ethos lost its contemporary reality. Often this elevating message was a sermon in favor of just those traditional American virtues which were now threatened with obsolescence in a changed social and political context. In this new context, the appeal of the paintings by the Regionalists and the American Scene painters often lay in their ability to recreate an atmosphere that glorified the traditional American values-self-reliance tempered with good-neighborliness, independence modified by a sense of community, hard work rewarded by a sense of order and purpose. Given the actual temper of the times, these themes were strangely anachronistic, just as the rhetoric supporting political isolationism was equally inappropriate in an international situation soon to involve America in a second world war Such themes gained popularity because they filled a genuine need for a comfortable collective fantasy of a God-fearing, white-picket-fence America, which in retrospect took on the nostalgic appeal of a lost Golden Age. In this light, an autonomous art-for-art's sake was viewed as a foreign invader liable to subvert the native American desire for a purposeful art. Abstract art was assigned the role of the villainous alieen; realism was to personify the genuine American means of expression. The argument drew favor in many camps: .among the artists, because most were realists; among the politically oriented intellectuals, because abstract art was apolitical; and among museum officials, because they were surfeited with mediocre imitations of European modernism and were convinced that American art must develop its own distinct identity. To help along this road to self-definition, the museums were prepared to set up an artificial double standard, one for American art, and another for European art. In 1934, Ralph Flint wrote in Art News, "We have today in our midst a greater array of what may be called second-, third, and fourth-string artists than any other country. Our big annuals are marvelous outpourings of intelligence and skill; they have all the diversity and animation of a fine-ring circus."

单选题The ideological make-up of the unions is now ______ different from what it had been.

单选题Ever hear of the lemming? Lemmings are arctic rat-like animals with very odd habits: periodically, for unknown reasons, they mass together in large herd and commit suicide by rushing into deep water and drowning themselves. They all run in together, blindly, and not one of them ever seems to stop and ask, "Why am I doing this? Is this really what I 'want to do?" and thus save it serf from destruction. Obviously, lemmings are driven to perform their strange suicide rites by common instinct. People choose to "follow the herd" for more complex reasons, yet we are still too often the unwilling victims of the bandwagon appeal. Essentially, the bandwagon urges us to an action or an opinion because it is popular—be- cause "everyone else is doing it." This call to "get on the bandwagon" appeals to the strong de- sire in most of us to be one of the crowd, not to be left out or alone. Advertising makes extensive use of the bandwagon appeal, bat so do politicians. Senator Yakalot uses the bandwagon appeal when he says "more and more citizens are rallying to my cause every day," and asks his audience to "join them—and me—in our fight for America." One of the ways we can see the bandwagon appeal at work is in the overwhelming success of various fashions and trends, which capture the interests of thousands of people for a short time, then disappear suddenly and completely. For a year or two in the 1950S every child in North America wanted a coonskin cap so that they could be like Davy Crockett; no one wanted to be left out. After that there was the hula-hoop craze that helped to dislocate thousands of Americans. The problem here is obvious: just because everyone's doing it doesn't mean that we should too. Group approval does not approve that something is true or is worth doing: Large numbers of people have supported actions we now condemn. Just a generation ago, Hitler and Mussolini rose to absolute and destructive rule in two of the most cultured countries of Europe. When they came into power they won by massive popular support from millions of people who didn't want to be "left out" at a. great historical moment. As we have seen, propaganda can appeal to us by arousing our emotions or distracting our attention from the real issues at hand. But there's third way that propaganda can be put to work against us—by use of faulty logic. This approach is really subtler than the other two because it gives the appearance of reasonable, fair argument. It is only when we look more closely that the holes in logic fiber show up.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} There are several different methods that can be used to create a forecast. The method a forecaster chooses depends upon the experience of the forecaster, the amount of information available to the forecaster, the level of difficulty that the forecast situation presents, and the degree of accuracy or confidence needed in the forecast. The first of these methods is the persistence method; the simplest way of producing a forecast. The persistence method assumes that the conditions at the time of the forecast will not Change. For example, if it is sunny and 87 degrees today, the persistence method predicts that it will be sunny and 87 degrees tomorrow. If two inches of rain fell today, the persistence method would predict two inches of rain for tomorrow. However, if weather conditions change significantly from day to day, the persistence method usually breaks down and is not the best forecasting method to use. The trends method involves determining the speed and direction of movement for fronts, high and. low pressure centers, and areas of clouds and precipitation. Using this information, the forecaster can predict where he or she expects those features to be at some future time. For example, if a storm system is 1,000 miles west of your location and moving to the east at 250 miles per day, using the trends method you would predict it to arrive in your area in 4 days. The trends method works well when systems continue to move at the same speed in the same direction for a long period of time. If they slow down, speed up, change intensity, or change direction, the trends forecast will probably not work as well. The climatology method is another simple way of producing a forecast. This method involves averaging weather statistics accumulated over many years to make the forecast. For example, if you were using the climatology method to predict the weather for New York City on July 4th, you would go through all the weather data that has been recorded for every July 4th and take an average. The climatology method only works well when the weather pattern is similar to that expected for the chosen time of year. If the pattern is quite unusual for the given time of year, the climatology method will often fail. The analog method is a slightly more complicated method of producing a forecast. It involves examining today's forecast scenario and remembering a day in the past when the weather scenario looked very similar (an analog). The forecaster would predict that the weather in this forecast will behave the same as it did in the past. The analog method is difficult to use because it is virtually impossible to find a perfect analog. Various weather features rarely align themselves in the same locations they were in the previous time. Even small differences between the current time and the analog can lead to very different results.

单选题The first three days of July 1863 saw the bloodiest hours of the Civil War, in a battle that spilled across the fields and hills surrounding Gettysburg, Pa. The fighting climaxed in the bright, hot afternoon of the third day, when more than 11,000 Confederate soldiers mounted a disastrous assault on the heart of the Union line. That assault marked the farthest the South would penetrate into Union territory. In a much larger sense, it marked the turning point of the war. No surprise, then, that the Battle of Gettysburg would become the subject of songs, poems, funeral monuments and, ultimately, some of the biggest paintings ever displayed on this continent. Paul Philippoteaux, famed for his massive 360-degree cyclorama paintings, painted four versions of the battle in the 1880s. Cycloramas were hugely popular in the United States in the last decades of the 19th century, before movies displaced them in the public's affection. Conceived on a mammoth scale, a cyclorama painting was longer than a football field and almost 50 feet tall. Little thought was given to preserving these enormous works of art. They were commercial ventures, and when they stopped earning they were tossed. Most were ultimately lost—victims of water damage or fire. One of Philippoteaux's Gettysburg renderings was cut up and hung in panels in a Newark, N.J., department store before finding its way back to Gettysburg, where it has been displayed off and on since 1913. Along the way, the painting lost most of its sky and a few feet off the bottom. Sections were cut and moved to patch holes in other sections. And some of the restorative efforts proved almost as crippling to the original as outright neglect. Since 2003, a team of conservators has labored in a $12 million effort to restore Philippoteaux's masterwork. They have cleaned it front and back, patched it, added canvas for a new sky and returned the painting to its original shape—a key part of a cyclorama's optical illusion was its hyperbolic shape, it bellies out at its central point, thrusting the image toward the viewer. When restoration is completed later this year, the painting will be the centerpiece of the new Gettysburg battlefield visitors' center, which opens to the public on April 14. Much work remains to be done. But even partially restored, the painting seethes with life—and death.

单选题People in Bangladesh can use ______ as a safe source of drinking water.

单选题I was extremely exasperated when I saw that my room was littered with wood shavings.

单选题He spent hundreds of hours in the ______of skill with a rifle.

单选题How does the author feel about the future of the English language?

单选题Crossing Wesleyan university's campus usually requires walking over colorful messages chalked on the ground. They can be as innocent as meeting announcements, but in a growing number of cases the language is meant to shock. It's not uncommon, for instance, to see lewd (淫荡的) references to professors' sexual preferences scrawled across a path or the mention of the word Nig' that African-American students say make them feel uncomfortable. In response, officials and students at schools are now debating ways to lead their communities away from forms of expression that offend or harass (侵扰). In the process, they're butting up against the difficulties of regulating speech at institutions that pride themselves on fostering open debate. Mr. Bennet of Wesleyan says he had gotten used to seeing occasional chalkings filled with four-letter words. Campus tradition made any horizontal surface not attached to a building a potential billboard. But when chalkings began taking on a more threatening and lewd tone, Bennet decided to act. "This is not acceptable in a workplace and not acceptable in an institution of higher learning," Bennet says. For now, Bonnet is seeking input about what kind of message-posting policy the school should adopt. The student assembly recently passed a resolution saying the "right to speech comes with implicit responsibilities to respect community standards." Other public universities have confronted problems this year while considering various ways of regulating where students can express themselves. At Harvard Law School, the recent controversy was more linked to the academic setting. Minority students there are seeking to curb what they consider harassing speech in the wake of a series of incidents last spring. At a meeting held by the "Committee on Healthy Diversity" last week, the school's Black Law Students Association endorsed a policy targeting discriminatory harassment. It would trigger a review by school officials if there were charges of "severe or pervasive conduct" by students or faculty. The policy would cover harassment based on, but not limited to, factors such as race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, national origin, and ethnicity (种族划分). Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate, says other schools have adopted similar harassment policies that are actually speech codes, punishing students for raising certain ideas. "Restricting students from saying anything that would be perceived as very unpleasant by another student continues uninterrupted," says Silverglate, who attended the Harvard Law town meeting last week.

单选题The detectives kept a ______ watch of the suspect's house.

单选题Some would consider that an Uinfringement/U of good manners whereas others would not.