单选题As for the missing funds, the company manager, when demanded to give an explanation, could not even come up with a ______one.(2005年北京大学考博试题)

单选题His attention often ______ at lectures. No wonder he failed the exam.

单选题The radio was of ______ quality that I took it back and asked for a better one.

单选题My grandpa gave me a watch, which is made of gold, ______I keep to this day.

单选题A possible reason that a child having an unhappy relation with his/her mother will not be affected by maternal separation at 6 to 9 months is that ______.

单选题A wheel is any dish like object that can be used for transportation or in machinery. To be useful, a wheel must revolve (1) an axle, which is normally a shaft attached (2) the wheel's center. No one is exactly sure when the wheel was first (3) . But it is thought to have been in use during the early Bronze Age in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in the Middle East— (4) Iraq is located today. We know that ancient people there used (5) . These and other wheeled vehicles are shown in artwork from the area (6) back to 3500 B.C. How were such (7) developed? The idea began when people placed logs as rollers under a platform. They were used to (8) heavy loads. The center of the logs may have been partly hewn, or carved away, (9) a narrow axle between solid, thick wheels at each end. Some ancient Middle East people even wrapped leather tires around the solid wooden wheels attached to (10) carts. Probably the first way (11) wheels were used other than for transportation was in pottery making. (12) beautiful and useful pieces of pottery, a potter puts a lump of clay on a horizontally placed wheel which is attached to an axle. (13) the potter sits facing the wheel and makes it spin, using a foot pedal. The potter molds the clay, using both hands (14) fingers, as the wheel spins. Thus the clay is (15) . Various objects (16) bowls, plates, vases, and cups are produced in this manner. The wheel and axle also have other (17) . They are part of many (18) . An axle attached to a wheel, so that both spin at the same time, permits the use of small amounts of force to (19) very heavy load. This wheel-and-axle principle is used in all weight-lifting devices, such as cranes, hoists, and elevators. For example, by pulling a rope wrapped around the rim of a wheel, a person can lift a massive object with only a (20) amount of effort.

单选题Despite the fact that the two council members belonged to different political parties. They ______ the issue of how to finance the town debt.

单选题In 1998 consumers could purchase virtually anything over the Internet. Books, compact discs, and even stocks were available from World Wide Web sites that seemed to spring up almost dally. A few years earlier, some people had predicted that consumers accustomed to shopping in stores would be reluctant to buy things that they could not see or touch in person. For a growing number of time-starved consumers, however, shopping from their home computer was proved to be a convenient alternative to driving to the store. A research estimated that in 1998 US consumers would purchase $ 7.3 billion of goods over the Internet, double the 1997 total. Finding a bargain was getting easier owing to the rise of online auctions and Web sites that did comparison shopping on the Internet for the best deal. For all the consumer interest, retailing in cyberspace was still a largely unprofitable business, however. Internet pioneer Amazon. com, which began selling books in 1995 and liter branched into recorded music and videos, posted revenue of $ 153.7 million in the third quarter, up from $ 37.9 million in the same period of 1997. Overall, however, the company"s loss widened to $ 45.2 million from $ 9.6 million, and analysis did not expect the company to turn a profit until 2001. Despite the great loss, Amazon. com had a stock market value of many billions, reflecting investors" optimism about the future of the industry Internet retailing appealed to investors because it provided an efficient means for reaching millions of consumers without having the cost of operating conventional stores with their armies of salespeople. Selling online carried its own risks, however. With so many companies competing for consumers" attention, price competition was intense and profit margins thin or nonexistent. one video retailer sold the hit movie Titanic for $ 9. 99, undercutting (削价) the $ 19.99 suggested retail price and losing about $ 6 on each copy sold. With Internet retailing still in its initial stage, companies seemed willing to absorb such losses in an attempt to establish a dominant market position.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} Despite efforts to provide them with alternatives such as the shelter, women frequently and repeatedly returned to violent and abusive partners. By the late 1970s, feminists at Women Together, like those doing similar work throughout the United States, began to understand that battered women experience a range of post-traumatic psychological responses to abuse, similar to those of victims of other types of violence or trauma. Subsequently, the psychological response of battered women became reified as "battered woman syndrome," a sub-category of post-traumatic stress disorder. Interestingly, in the course of trying to create social change, the focus of feminists perceptibly shifted to trying to explain why battered women fail to leave the partners who beat them. In trying to address this question, a debate ensued among feminists and mental health workers as to potential merits and problems of categorizing as mental disorder what many feminists labeled a normal response to fear and an appropriately angry response to abuse. Although many women left abusive relationships or successfully ended violence by other means, some responded to ongoing or accelerated abuse by killing or trying to kill their male partners. In many states, when they went to trial, such women found they were restricted from introducing testimony about the abuse they had endured or their resulting states of mind. In trying to address these women's needs, some activists and scholars advocated the use of expert testimony to explain battered woman syndrome to juries. This strategy would introduce evidence of past abuse and challenge the gender biases of self-defense law by explaining the woman's state of mind at the time of the offense. Feminist legal scholars raised potential problems in the use of battered woman syndrome. They argued that it could be used against women who did not neatly fit pre-established criteria and had the potential to become another example of the tendency to label women's normal angry responses as mental illness. While the desirability of working to admit expert testimony was debated, individual state courts and legislatures varied in their willingness to recognize battered woman syndrome, permit evidence of past abuse, or allow expert testimony. As the legal debate about battered women's responses to violence was beginning to unfold, the Ohio movement became directly involved in it when a former shelter resident, shot and killed her abusive common law husband. In 1978 Women Together, in conjunction with the woman's lawyer, decided to challenge existing law by trying to introduce battered woman syndrome expert testimony at trial. Because at the time the syndrome had little scientific merit or legal recognition, the trial court declared inadmissibility, a decision upheld by the State Supreme Court (State v. Thomas 1981 66 Ohio St. 2d 51). Women Together founders left the shelter to establish professional careers, viewing this as a means of advancing the feminist agenda. The frustrations, limitations and defeats they had experienced as outside challengers impelled them to adopt a strategy of infiltration and appropriation of the institutions they sought to change. For example, one founder, who had worked through lobbying for ERA America in addition to her other feminist activism, explained her decision to run for elected office by saying: "[When ERA was defeated] I decided to run for the legislature. I said 'I can do better than these turkeys. '"

单选题{{B}}Passage 5{{/B}} Social psychologists arc used to hearing that their experiments are a waste of time because they just prove the obvious, and tell us what we always knew. But there is a very simple and effective riposte to this accusation. The trouble with folk-wisdom (what we always knew) is that it tends to come in pairs of statements, both of which are obviously' true, but which—unfortunately—are mutually exclusive. For example, birds of a feather flock together, but what about the attraction of opposites? Experiments may not be as much fun as intuitions, but they sometimes tell us which proverbs are actually true, or (moor often) in what circumstances which apply. There is one other preconception to be removed before tackling the question of whom we like and love, whom we find attractive and make friends with: "Why bother to study an area in which we are all expert practitioners?" Well, ff you believe that, have a word with a marriage guidance counselor, a psychiatrist, or someone involved in industrial relations. Research on friendship has established a number of facts, some interesting, some even useful. Did you know that the average student has 5-6 friends, or that a friend who was previously an enemy is liked more than the one who has always been on the right side? Would you believe that physically attractive individuals are preferred as friends to those less comely, and is it fair that physically attractive defendants are less likely to be found guilty in court? Unfortunately, such tidbits don't tell us much more than the nature or the purpose of friendship. In fact, studies of friendship seem to implicate more complex factors. For example, one function friendship seems to fulfill is that it supports the image we have of ourselves, and confirms the value of the attitudes we hold. Several studies have shown that we judge them to be more like us than they (objectively) are. This suggests that we ought to choose friends who are similar to us ('birds of a feather') rather than those who would be complementary ('opposites attract'), a prediction which is supported by empirical evidence, at least so far as attitudes and beliefs are concerned. In one experiment, some developing friendships were monitored amongst first-year students living in the same hostel. It was found that similarity of attitudes (towards politics, religion, and ethics, pastimes and aesthetics) was a good predictor of what friendships would be established by the end of four months, though it had less to do with initial alliances. The difficulty of linking friendship with similarity of personality probably reflects the complexity of our personalities. This of course can explain why we may have two close friends who have little in common and indeed dislike each other. By and large, though, it looks as though we would do well to choose friends ( and spouses) who resemble us. If this were not so, computer dating agencies would have gone out of business years ago.

单选题Scientists formerly assumed that coral populations remained stable, dead polyps being replaced by now ones that build on the "skeletons" left behind. Recent investigations, however, reveal more dynamic processes. Whole sections of a colony may die and not be replaced. This process, known as partial colony mortality, is evident in a series of photographs over time, but often impossible to detect in site because "skeletons" bared by the death of overlying tissue are readily overgrown by other organisms or abraded by grazers. Partial mortality can produce fission the process of a large colony splitting apart into two or more adjacent colonies that presumably have identical genetic makeup. Subsequent lateral growth may unite these colonies in a process called fusion. As a consequence of these three processes, estimates of coral ages based on size are Partial mortality and fission, which reduce colony size, occur more frequently than fusion, and thus estimates of coral age based on colony size are probably far too low.

单选题He has pointed out the dangers ______ in this type of nuclear power station.

单选题The teachers made the English class consist of a ______ group of the students of similar abilities.

单选题European conservatives, until the end of the 19th century, rejected democratic principles and institutions. Instead they opted for monarchies or for authoritarian government. A. chose B. constructed C. conceived D. conserved

单选题I'm sure that she'll cope with the changes very well. She is very ______.

单选题The dean tried to retain control of the situation on campus, but his attempt was ______ by the board of trustees.

单选题The banks were prepared to ______ 50 million dollars to tide over the company.

单选题An intelligent TV viewer may occasionally become enraged by the argumentation in ______ commercials. A. imperative B. fallacious C. persuasive D. fabulous

单选题Melinda French designed Microsoft Bob which was to ease the misery of computer users by ______.