单选题Our culture has caused most Americans to assume not only that our language is universal but that the gestures we use are understood by everyone. We do not realize that waving good-bye is the way to summon a person from the Philippines to one's side, or that in Italy and some Latin American countries, curling the finger to oneself is a sign of farewell. Those private citizens who sent packages, to our troops occupying Germany after World War II and marked them GIFT to escape duty payments did not bother to find out that "Gift" means poison in German. Moreover, we like to think of ourselves as friendly, yet we prefer to be at least 3 feet or an arm's length away from others. Latins and Middle Easterners like to come closer and touch, which makes Americans uncomfortable. Our linguistic (语言上的) and cultural blindness and the casualness with which we take notice of the developed tastes, gestures, customs and languages of other countries, are losing us friends, business and respect in the world. Even here in the United States, we make few concessions to the needs of foreign visitors. There are no information signs in four languages on our public buildings or monuments; we do not have multilingual (多语言的) guided tours. Very few restaurant menus have translations, and multilingual waiters, bank clerks and policemen are rare. Our transportation systems have maps in English only and often we ourselves have difficulty understanding them. When we go abroad, we tend to cluster in hotels and restaurants where English is spoken. The attitudes and information we pick up are conditioned by those natives—usually the richer—who speak English. Our business dealings, as well as the nation's diplomacy, are conducted through interpreters. For many years, America and Americans could get by with cultural blindness and linguistic ignorance. After all, America was the most powerful country of the free world, the distributor of needed funds and goods. But all that is past, American dollars no longer buy all good things, and we are slowly beginning to realize that our proper role in the world is changing. A 1979 Harris poll reported that 55 percent of Americans want this country to play a more significant role in world affairs; we want to have a hand in the important decisions of the next century, even though it may not always be the upper hand.

单选题Five score years ago, a great American, ______ symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. A. with his B. in whose C. by him D. of whom

单选题Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick Ⅱ in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent. All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected. Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed. Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar. Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What special about man"s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattem "toy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain"s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyse, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways. But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child"s babbling, grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child"s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

单选题The ______ analysis by H.L. Mencken of the American character outraged some and delighted others.

单选题Most people who travel long distance complain of jetlag. Jetlag makes business travel ers less productive and more prone (21) making mistakes. It is actually caused by (22) of your "body clock" —a small cluster of brain cells that controls the timing of biological (23) . The body clock is designed for a (24) rhythm of daylight and darkness, so that it is thrown out of balance when it (25) daylight and darkness at the "wrong" times in a new time zone. The (26) of jetlag often persist for days (27) the internal body clock slowly adjusts to the new time zone. Now a new anti-jetlag system is (28) that is based on proven (29) pioneering scien tific research. Dr. Martin Mooreede had (30) a practical strategy to adjust the body clock much sooner to the new time zone (31) controlled exposure to bright light. The time zone shift is easy to accomplish and eliminates (32) of the discomfort of jetlag. A successful time zone shift depends on knowing the exact times to either (33) or avoid bright light. Exposure to light at the wrong time can actually make jetlag worse. The proper schedule (34) light exposure depends a great deal on (35) travel plans.

单选题 Coincident with concerns about the accelerating loss of species and habitats has been a growing appreciation of the importance of biological diversity, the number of species in a particular ecosystem, to the health of the Earth and human beings. Much has been written about the diversity of terrestrial organisms, particularly the exceptionally rich life associated with tropical rain-forest habitats. Relatively little has been said, however, about diversity of life in the sea even though coral reef systems are comparable to rain forests in terms of richness of life. An alien exploring the Earth would probably give priority to the planet's dominant, most distinctive feature—the ocean. Humans have a bias toward land that sometimes gets in the way of truly examining global issues. Seen from far away, it is easy to realize that landmasses occupy one-third of the Earth's surface. Given that two-thirds of the Earth's surface is water and that marine life lives at all levels of the ocean, the total three- dimensional living space of the ocean is perhaps 100 times greater than that of land and contains more than 90 percent of all life on Earth even though the ocean has fewer distinct species. The fact that half of the known species are thought to inhabit the world's rain forests does not seem surprising, considering the huge numbers of insects that comprise the bulk of species. One scientist found many different species of ants in just one tree from a rain forest. While every species is different from every other species, their genetic makeup constrains them to be insects and to share similar characteristics with 750 000 species of insects. If basic, broad categories such as phyla and classes are given more emphasis than differentiating between species, then the greatest diversity of life is unquestionably the sea. Nearly every major type of plant and animal has some representation there. To appreciate fully the diversity of abundance of life in the sea, it helps to think small. Every spoonful of ocean water contains life on the order of 100 to 100 000 bacterial cells plus assorted microscopic plants and animals, including larva's or organisms ranging from sponges and corals to starfish and clams and much more.

单选题Few creations of big technology capture the imagination like giant dams. Perhaps it is humankind"s long suffering at the mercy of flood and drought that makes the ideal of forcing the waters to do our bidding so fascination. But to be fascinated is also, sometimes, to be blind Several giant dam projects threaten to do more harm than good. The lesson from dams is that big is not always beautiful. It doesn"t help that building a big, powerful dam has become a symbol of achievement for nations and people striving to assert themselves. Egypt"s leadership in the Arab world was cemented by the Aswan High Dam. Turkey"s bid for First World status includes the giant Ataturk Dam. But big dams tend not to work as intended. The Aswan Dam, for example stopped the Nile flooding but deprived Egypt of the fertile silt that floods left—all in return for a giant reservoir of disease which is now so full of silt that it barely generates electricity. And yet, the myth of controlling the waters persists. This week, in the heart of civilized Europe, Slovaks and Hungarians stopped just short of sending in the troops in their contention over a dam on the Danube. The huge complex will probably have all the usual problems of big dams. But Slovakia is bidding for independence from the Czechs, and now needs a dam to prove itself. Meanwhile, in India, the World Bank has given the go ahead to the even more wrong headed Narmada Dam. And the bank has done this even though its advisors say the dam will cause hardship for the powerless and environmental destruction. The benefits are for the powerful, but they are far from guaranteed. Proper scientific study of the impacts of dams and of the cost and benefits of controlling water can help to resolve these conflicts. Hydroelectric power and flood control and irrigation are possible without building monster dams. But when you are dealing with myths, it is hard to be either proper, or scientific. It is time that the world learned the lessons of Aswan. You don"t need a dam to be saved.

单选题Envy and jealousy of other people and their lives become ______ once you start believing in yourself.

单选题From the passage we may well understand that the author ______.

单选题It's a result more of ______ than anything else to win the top prize in a lottery.

单选题The government should ______ with the irrational regulations restricting drinking hours.

单选题As used in the first line of the second paragraph, the word "utter" means ______.

单选题FLOWER: VIOLET

单选题 In a stark ______ of fortunes, the Philippines—once Asia's second richest country recently had to beg Vietnam to sell its rice for its hungry millions.

单选题Six years later, in an about-face, the FBI admits that federal agents fired tear gas canisters capable of causing a fire at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas in 1993. But the law enforcement official said the firing came several hours before the structure burst into flames, killing 80 people including the Davidians' leader, David Koresh. "In looking into this, we've come across information that shows some canisters that can be deemed pyrotechnic in nature were fired—hours before the fire started," the official said. "Devices were fired at the bunker, not at the main structure where the Davidians were camped out." The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains it did not start what turned to be a series of fiery bursts of flames that ended a 51-day standoff between branch members and the federal government. "This doesn't change the bottom line that David Koresh started the fire and the government did not," the official said. "It simply shows that devices that could probably be flammable were used in the early morning hours." The law enforcement official said the canisters were fired not at the main structure where the Davidian members were camped out but at the nearby underground bunker. They bounced off the bunkers concrete roof mad landed in an open field well, the official said. The canisters were fired at around 6 a.m., and the fire that destroyed the wooden compound started around noon, the official said. The official also added that other tear gas canisters used by agent that day were not flammable or potentially explosive. While Coulson denied the grenades played a role in starting the fire, his statement marked the first time that any U. S. government official has publicly contradicted the govemment's position that federal agents used nothing on the final day of the siege at Waco that could have sparked the fire that engulfed the compound. The cause of the fiery end is a major focus of an ongoing inquiry by the Texas Rangers into the Waco siege.

单选题"It was the beginning of a revolution in America and the world, a revolution that some have yet to acknowledge and many have yet to appreciate," says Harold Skramstad, president of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. 17767 No indeed: 1896, when Frank Duryea finally perfected the Duryea Motor Wagon. At its first airing, the contraption rolled less than 100 metres before the transmission froze up. But by the end of 1896 Duryea had sold 13 of them, thus giving birth to the American motor industry. That industry (whose roots, outside America, are usually attributed to tinkerings by Messrs Daimler and Benz in Germany) is being celebrated hugely over the coming months, culminating with a Great American Cruise in Detroit in June. "Our goal is to attract the greatest collection of antique and classic cars this nation has ever seen in one place at one time," says Mr. Skramstad modestly. Americans may indeed blame the car for almost everything that has happened to their country, and themselves, since 1896. The car has determined: The way they live. From cradle to grave, the car marks every rite of American passage. Home by car from the maternity ward; first driving licence (usually at the age of 16); first (backseat) sexual experience; first car of one's own (and the make of car is a prime determinant of social status, symbolic of everything a person is or does). In Las Vegas, and elsewhere, Americans can get married at drive-in chapels. They then buy, or lust after, a house with garages big enough for not one but two or three cars. This allocates more space to cars than to children. And when the time comes, they may lie in state at a drive-through funeral home, where you can pay your respects without pulling over. The way they shop. Main Street has been replaced by the strip mall and the shopping mall, concentrating consumer goods in an auto-friendly space. A large part of each shopping trip must now be spent, bags under chin, searching for the place where the car was left. (And another point: bags have annoyingly lost their carrying handles since shoppers ceased to be pedestrian) Since car-friendly living and shopping became the role, most builtup parts of America now look like every other part. There is simply no difference between a Burger Inn in California and one on the outskirts of Boston. The way they eat. A significant proportion of Americans' weekly meals are now consumed inside cars, sometimes while parked outside the (drive-by) eatery concerned, sometimes en route, which leads to painful spillages in laps, leading to overburdening of the legal system. Dozens of laws have been written to deal with car cases, ranging from traffic disputes to product liability. Drive-by shootings require a car, as do most getaways. The car is a great crime accessory; and it also causes the deaths of nearly 40,000 Americans every year. Personal finances. Before the age of the car, few people went into debt; no need to borrow money to buy a home. Now Americans tie themselves up with extended installment loans, and this in turn has spawned a whole financial industry. The wealth of the nation. By 1908, an estimated 485 different manufacturers were building cars in the United States. Employment grew nearly 100-fold in the industry during the first decade of the 20th century. When Henry Ford, in a stroke of genius, automated his production line he required a rush of new, unskilled labour, which he enticed by offering an unheard-of $ 5 a day in wages. Henceforth, workers could actually afford to buy what they built. And Americans never looked back. Today, the Big Three car manufacturers (Food, GM and Chrysler) generate more than $ 200 billion a year in business inside the United States. Directly and indirectly, the industry employs roughly one in seven workers. Every car job is reckoned to add $100,000 in goods and services to the economy, twice the national average. People occasionally suppose that the car is under attack as it enters its second century. Environmental regulators and transport planners (with their talk of car pools and subways) tend to give this impression. There are signs that personal computers may be replacing the sports car as the chief passion, and expense, of young men. But, in the end, nothing beats the idea of individual mobility. In a society that values freedom above all, the obvious way to celebrate a centenary is just to keep driving.