单选题The passage's success lies in its extensive use of ______.

单选题Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December. Tbis near-tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979-1980, when they also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time? The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term. Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past. Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energy-intensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consultancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP ( in constant prices) rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $22 a barrel for a full year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25% ~ 0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies—to which heavy industry has shifted—have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed. One more reason not to lose sleep over the rise in oil prices is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not occurred against the background of general commodity-price inflation and global excess demand. A sizable port/on of the world is only just emerging from economic decline. The Economist's commodity price index is broadly unchanging from a year ago. In 1973 commodity prices jumped by 70% , and in 1979 by almost 30%.

单选题Amazon has given in to publisher pressure and agreed to abandon their $9.99 price point for e-Books. PuNisher Macmillan felt that the $9.99 price devalued many of its bestsellers, which often sell for $30 in hardcover format. In response to the pricing dispute, Amazon briefly removed all Macmillan books from its store last week. However, the boycott lasted only a few days before Amazon gave in to Macmillan's demands. In a statement Sunday, Amazon defended its position to customers: Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-Book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases. We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-Books. Amazon's decision to throw in the towel may be related to Macmillan's recent agreement to sell books in Apple's iBookstore. Amazon has captured an overwhelming share of the e-Book market with its Kindle reader, but if the iPad becomes successful publishers may turn to Apple to sell their e-Books. Publishers seem more interested in protecting the value of their hardcover books than competing in a digital format. Will higher e-Book prices convince you to purchase a physical copy of your next novel, or will you accept a modest price increase given that e-Books are typically cheaper?

单选题Which of the following statements best expresses the author's attitude toward the damage to vegetation caused by foraging elephants?

单选题Many pure metals have little use because they are too soft, rust too easily, or have some other______.(电子科技大学2005年试题)

单选题The work that women do has always been fundamental to the global economy. But their contribution hasn't registered with traditional economic institutions because so much of it has been nonmonetary. In fact, one common economic term for nonmonetary work is inactivity. It's that attitude that has made women's work invisible. No wonder the battle cry of the women's movement was equality. By moving into the world of paid work, in rich countries at least, women have indeed upped their visibility. But I doubt that you could make a very conclusive case that they have become equal to men. The United Nations estimated in 1993 that economic equality between the sexes would take, at the pace then prevailing, 1,000 years to achieve. The media love female high fliers, the handful of company directors and CEOs who are trotted out time and again as evidence of the gains women have made. But they are not truly representative of the average working woman, saddled with a double burden as she tries to balance her job with life as a mother and homemaker. This balancing act is a formula for unfulfillment. It would have been far more equitable for women in the long run if it was the nonmonetary work that had been shared out — if, for example, men spent more than a fraction of the time with their children that their wives do. And I believe that, in practice, most women would prefer simple fairness to economic equality. As my friend Hazel Henderson says, our kids didn't want to see us turn into the best bloody men. Still, it's very much a trend to focus on the global economic impact of women, particularly as it's felt in the small-scale initiatives that women have established around the world. Dealing directly with economically marginalized communities and cooperatives around the globe, I've seen how women hold a society together. Economic opportunity means much more to them than money. It also fosters the fundamentals of self-esteem education, health care, cultural continuity and the chance to protect the past while shaping a future. A sense of community is one of the so-called "feminine" values that ethical business thinkers put forward in their quest for new paradigms. These values reflect intimate personal and cultural attributes that are in many ways the reverse of the global-market syndrome, which is all about distance, impersonality and the movement of capital regardless of human consequence. You don't have to wonder what would happen if we could feminize economic activity and economic relations. There is already plenty of evidence in the work of some pioneering female thinkers whose concern about the society their children will inherit promises to fundamentally change global economics. In fact, most of the financial sector's innovative thinking on socially responsive investing has come from women. Why am I not surprised? Globalization is a mug's game being played in a Man's world. I can imagine a day when compassion counts as much as cash flow. After all, the challenges that confront the business world already demand a holistic perspective. And who is going to be best equipped to face that future?

单选题______ that the earth was flat?

单选题South Korea"s hagwon (private tutoring academies) crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country"s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008. But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades—and often nothing else—have long been prized as essential for professional success. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore" Education Minister was asked last year about his nation"s reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We"re not as bad as the Koreans." In Seoul, large numbers of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. At the prestigious Daesung Institute, admission is based on students" test scores. Only 14% of applicants are accepted. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nation"s top three universities. From a distance, South Korea"s results look enviable. Its students consistently outperform their counterparts in almost every country in reading and math. In the U.S., Barack Obama and his Education Secretary speak glowingly of the enthusiasm South Korean parents have for educating their children, and they lament how far the U.S. students are falling behind. Without its education obsession, South Korea could not have been transformed into the economic powerhouse that it is today. But the country"s leaders worry that unless its rigid, hierarchical system starts to nurture more innovation, economic growth will stall—and fertility rates will continue to decline as families feel the pressure of paying for all that tutoring. "You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system." Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, "but Koreans are not happy with it."

单选题When, in the age of automation, man searches for a worker to do the tedious, unpleasant jobs that are impossible to mechanize, he may very profitably consider the ape. If we tackled the problem of breeding for brains with as much as enthusiasm as we devote to breeding dogs of surrealistic shapes, we could eventually produce assorted models of useful primates, ranging in size from the gorilla down to the baboon, each adapted to a special kind of work. It is not putting too much strain on the imagination to assume that geneticists could produce a super-ape, able to understand some scores of words, and capable of being trained for such jobs as picking fruit, cleaning up the litter in parks, shining shoes, collecting garbage, doing household chores, and even baby-sitting (though I have known some babies I would not care to trust with a valuable ape). Apes could do many jobs, such as cleaning streets and the more repetitive types of agricultural work, without supervision, though they might need protection from those exceptional specimens of Homo sapiens who think it amusing to tease or bully anything they consider lower on the evolutionary ladder. For other tasks, such as delivering papers and laboring on the docks, our man-ape would have to work under human overseers; and, incidentally, I would love to see the finale of the twenty-first century version of the Waterfront in which the honest but hairy hero will drum on his chest after—literally taking the wicked labor leader apart. Once a supply of nonhuman workers becomes available, a whole range of low IQ jobs could be thankfully relinquished by mankind, to its great mental and physical advantage. What is more, one of the problems which has plagued so many fictional Utopias would be avoided: There would be none of the deridingly subhuman Epsilons of Huxley's Brave New World to act as a permanent reproach to society, for there is a profound moral difference between breeding sub-men and super-apes, though the end products are much the same. The first would introduce a form of slavery, the second would be a biological triumph which could benefit both men and animals.

单选题To his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the social ______ were no more than are the irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial curve.

单选题2 Thirty-two people watched Kitty Genovese being killed right beneath their win dows. She was their neighbor. Yet none of the 32 helped her. Not one even called the po lice. Was this in gunman cruelty? Was it lack of feeling about one's fellow man? "Not so," say scientists John Barley and Bib Fatane. These men went beyond the headlines to probe the reasons why people didn't act. They found that a person has to go through two steps before he can help. First he has to notice that is an emergency. Suppose you see a middle-aged man fall to the side-walk, is he having a heart attack? Is he in a coma from diabetes? Or is he about to sleep off a drunk? Is the smoke coming into the room from a leak in the air conditioning? Is it "steam pipes," Or is it really smoke from a fire? It's not always easy to tell if you are faced with a real emergency. Second, and more important, the person faced with an emergency must feel personal ly responsible. He must feel that he must help, or the person won't get the help he needs. The researchers found that a lot depends on how many people are around. They had college students in to be "tested. " Some came alone. Some came with one or two others. And some came in large groups. The receptionist started them off on the "tests. " Then she went into the next room. A curtain divided the "testing room" and the room into which she went. Soon the students heard a scream, the noise of file cabinets falling and cry for help. All of this had been pre-recorded on a tape-recorder. Eight out of ten of the students taking the test alone acted to help. Of the students in pairs, only two out of the ten helped. Of the students in group, none helped. In other words, in a group, Americans often fail to act. They feel that others will act. They, themselves, needn't. They do not feel any direct responsibility. Are people bothered by situation where people are in trouble? Yes, scientists found that the people were emotional, they sweated, they had trembling hands. They felt that other person's trouble. But they did not act. They were in a group. Their actions were shaped by the actions of those they were with.

单选题The girl ______ when she couldn't answer the question in the presence of all her classmates. A. flourished B. flattered C. flushed D. fluttered

单选题The man went to prison, but the two boys ______ with a warning. A. took off B. got off C. kept off D. set off

单选题When travelling, you are advised to lake travellers' checks, which provide a secure ______ to carrying your money in cash.

单选题Witnesses who ______ in a courtroom must swear to tell the troth when they speak for or against the person being tried.

单选题Someone who gives an expensive gift often feels that he should receive more praise than if he ______ a less expensive gift.

单选题When I heard that Mrs. Thacher resigned, I called her. I wanted her to know that my heart was ______ her.

单选题His mother's scolding Upierced him to the quick/U.