单选题Marcia Seligson calls the wedding dress the "key metaphor" in the elaborate effort to make the American wedding an "idealized departure from reality", and notes that in the early 1970s, at a time when love-ins, live-ins, and hippie weddings were throwing brickbats at tradition, 94 percent of American brides still chose to be married in white. The color has long been associated with weddings because of its supposed symbolic link to virginity. Commenting slyly on the tradition, Judith Martin (1982) observes that an engaged couple needs to decide "whether wearing a white wedding dress will be worth enduring the sneers of people who believe these must be accessorized by intact hymns". Viewed historically, the link between white and virginity (or, as it is sometimes euphemized, purity) is not as absolute as is often supposed. Brides in ancient Rome married in white, but because the color signified joy; they were veiled in bright orange veil, or flammeum, that suggested the flames of passion. In the western Catholic tradition, too, white has always been the color of joy, and it remains the iconographical-ly correct hue for such jubilant occasions as Easter Sunday. Some traditional societies use white to denote the significance of various passage ceremonies, among them funerals as well as weddings. For example, among the Andaman Islanders, said A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, white indicated simply a change of status; and the traditional Chinese white for funerals was a symbolic representation of hope. The "traditional" white wedding dress, moreover, is a recent innovation. Barbarar Fober explains that its popularity may owe less to the mystique of virginity than to a curious twist of conspicuous display. "Most Victorian bribes," she says, "wore simply their 'best finery' on their wedding day, and many wore traditional ethnic costumes." The white dress was an ostentatiously impractical innovation that became popular among the upper classes precisely because of its defects: "Victorian bribes" from privileged backgrounds wore white to indicate that they were rich enough to wear a dress for one day only. And throughout the first years of this century, brides from somewhat less privileged backgrounds would trot out the white dress on special occasions through-out the first year of their marriage. The custom of locking the treasure away after the wedding--so that, like a toasting glass, it could never be used for a lesser purpose--is less than a hundred years old.

单选题After thirty years of television, people have become "speed watchers". Consequently, if the camera lingers, the interest of the audience ______. A. broadens B. begins C. varies D. flags

单选题It is ______ understood by all concerned that the word no one who visits him ever breathe a syllable of in his heating will remain forever unspoken.

单选题The board has ______ some rules that every member of the club must follow. A. taken down B. set down C. let down D. laid down

单选题Many literary detectives have pored over a great puzzle concerning the writer Marcel Proust: what happened in 1909? How did Contre Saint-Beuve, an essay attacking the methods of the critic Saint Beuve, turn into the start of the novel Remembrance of Things Past? A recently published letter from Proust to the editor Vallette confirms that Fallois, the editor of the 1954 edition of Contre Saint-Beuve, made an essentially correct guess about the relationship of the essay to the novel. Fallois proposed that Proust had tried to begin a novel in 1908, abandoned it for what was to be a long demonstration of Saint-Beuve's blindness to the real nature of great writing, found the essay giving rise to personal memories and fictional developments, and allowed these to take over in a steadily developing novel. Draft passages in Proust's 1909 notebooks indicate that the transition from essay to novel began in Contre Saint-Beuve, when Proust introduced several examples to show the powerful influence that involuntary memory exerts over the creative imagination. In effect, in trying to demonstrate that the imagination is more profound and less submissive to the intellect than Saint-Beuve assumed, Proust elicited vital memories of his own and, finding subtle connections between them, began to amass the material for Remembrance. By August, Proust was writing to Vallette, informing him of his intention to develop the material as a novel. Maurice Bardeche, in Marcel Proust, Romancier, has shown the importance in the drafts of Remembrance of spontaneous and apparently random associations of Proust's subconscious. As incidents and reflections occurred to Proust, he continually inserted new passages altering and expanding his narrative. But he found it difficult to control the drift of his inspiration. The very richness and complexity of the meaningful relationships that kept presenting and rearranging themselves on all levels, from abstract intelligence to profound dreamy feelings, made it difficult for Proust to set them out coherently. The beginning of control came when he saw how to connect the beginning and the end of his novel. Intrigued by Proust's claim that he had "begun and finished" Remembrance at the same time, Henri Bonnet discovered that parts of Remembrance's last book were actually started in 1909. Already in that year, Proust had drafted descriptions of his novel's characters in their old age that would appear in the final book of Remembrance, where the permanence of art is set against the ravages of time. The letter to Vallette, drafts of the essay and novel, and Bonnet's researches establish in broad outline the process by which Proust generated his novel out of the ruins of his essay. But those of us who hoped, with Kolb, that Kolb's newly published complete edition of Proust's correspondence for 1909 would document the process in greater detail are disappointed. For until Proust was confident that he was at last in sight of a viable structure for Remembrance, he told few correspondents that he was producing anything more ambitious than Contre Saint-Beuve.

单选题During the past years the ______ of automobiles accidents in New York City has decreased.

单选题Two apparently contradictory statements are made about what Zimring thinks will be the out come of the debate about the death penalty: one, "that Americans' ambivalence about capital punishment can never be resolved" and two, that "Americans will eventually abolish the death penalty". What can we infer about this?

单选题Reflecting on our exploration, we also discovered that people will exploit the newness, vagueness, and breadth of the information Marketplace to support their wishes and predilections, ______ they may be.

单选题According to the passage, all of the following may affect a person's handedness except ______.

单选题It is A estimated that a scientific principle has B a life expectancy of approximately a C decade before D it drastically revised or replaced by newer information.

单选题A small child has to learn to keep its ______ before it can walk far.

单选题Since a circle has no beginning or end, the wedding ring is a symbol of______love.

单选题Which can be considered the best title for the passage?

单选题The spelling of many Old English words has been ______ in the living language, although their pronunciations have changed.

单选题Once upon a time, innovation at Procter ＆ Gamble flowed one way: from the United States outward. While the large Cincinnati-based corporation was no stranger to foreign markets, it usually Sold them products that were already familiar to most Americans. Many Japanese families, for instance, swaddle their babies in Pampers diapers, and lots of Venezuelans brush their teeth with Crest. And of course (company executives assumed) Americans at home wanted these same familiar, red-white and blue brands. We might buy foreign-made cars, or chocolates, or cameras but household cleaners and detergents? Recently, however, P＆G broke with this long-standing tradition. Ariel, a P＆G laundry detergent, was born overseas, and is a familiar sight on store shelves in Europe and Latin America. Now bilingual packages of Ariel Ultra. a super-concentrated cleaner. are appearing on supermarket shelves in Los Angeles. Ariel's appearance in the United States reflects demographic changes making Hispanics the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group. Ariel is a hit with this population. In fact, many Mexican immigrants living in Southern California have been "importing" Ariel from Tijuana, Mexico. "Hispanics knew this product and wanted it," says P＆G spokeswoman Marie Salvado. "We realized that we couldn't convince them to buy (our) other laundry detergents." P＆G hopes that non-Hispanic consumers will give Ariel a try too. Ariel's already strong presence in Europe may provide a springboard for the company to expand into other markets as well. Recently P＆G bought Rakona. Czechoslovakia's top detergent maker. Ariel, currently a top seller in Germany, is likely to be one of the first new brands to appear in Czech supermarkets. And Ariel is not the only foreign idea that the company hopes to transplant back to its home territory. Cinch, an all-purpose spray cleaner similar to popular European products, is currently being test-marketed in California and Arizona. Traditionally Americans have used separate cleaners for different types of surfaces, but market research shows that American preferences are becoming more like those in other countries. Insiders note that this new reverse flow of innovation reflects more sweeping changes at Procter ＆ Gamble. The firm has hired many new Japanese, German. and Mexican managers who view P＆G's business not as a one-way flow of American ideas, but a two-way exchange with other markets. Says Bonita Austin of the investment firm Wertheim-Schroeder, "When you met with P＆G's top managers years ago, you wouldn't have seen a single foreign face." Today, "they could even be in the majority." As Procter ＆ Gamble has found, the United States is no longer an isolated market. Americans are more open than ever before to buying foreign-made products and to selling U. S. -made products overseas.

单选题The rioters headed downtown, ______ they attacked city hall. A. since B. as C. whereupon D. yet

单选题"The foreign teachers wondered what we Chinese teachers do in political meetings and I told them that we had to go through the______of lengthy formalities. "

单选题Last year our school football team won four ______ games. A. obsessive B. concessive C. successive D. excessive