单选题The study shows that laying too much emphasis on exams is likely to ______ students’ enthusiasm in learning English. A. hold back B. hold off C. hold down D. adopt

单选题Parents of wailing(哀号)babies, take comfort: You are not alone. Chimpanzee babies fuss. Sea gull chicks squawk. Burying beetle larvae tap their parents' legs. Throughout the animal kingdom, babies know how to get their parents' attention. Exactly why evolution has produced all this fussing, squawking and tapping is a question many biologists are trying to answer. Someday, that answer may shed some light on the mystery of crying in human babies. " It may point researchers in the right direction to find the cause of excessive crying," said Joseph Soltis, a bioacoustics expert at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista. Florida. Soltis published an article on the evolution of crying in the current issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Young animals vary in how much they cry, squawk or otherwise communicate with their parents, and studies with mice, beetles and monkeys show that this variation is partly based on genes. Some level of crying in humans, of course, is based on gas pains and messy diapers. But as for the genetic contribution, you might expect that natural selection would favor genes for noisier children, since they would get more attention. Before long, however, this sort of deception may be ruinous. If the signals of offspring became totally unreliable, parents would no longer benefit from paying attention. Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that natural selection should therefore favor so-called honest advertisements. Some biologists have speculated that these honest advertisements may not just tell a parent which offspring are hungry. They might also show their parent that they are healthy and vigorous and therefore worth some extra investment. The babies of monkeys cry out to their mothers and tend to cry even more around the time their mothers wean(断奶)them. The mothers, in response, begin to ignore most of their babies' distress calls, since most turn out to be false alarms. " Initially, mothers respond any time an infant cries," said Dado Maestripieri, a primatologist at the University of Chicago. "But as the cries increase, they respond less and less. They become more skeptical. So infants start crying less. So they go through these cycles, adjusting their responses. " Kim Bard, a primatologist at the University of Plymouth in England, has spent more than a decade observing chimpanzee babies. "Chimps can cry for a long time if something terrible is happening to them, but when you pick them up, they stop," Bard said. "I've never seen any chimpanzees in the first three months of life be inconsolable. " Maestripieri and other researchers say these evolutionary forces may have also shaped the cries of human babies. "All primate infants cry. " Maestripieri said. "It's a very conserved behavior. It's not something humans have evolved on their own. "

单选题Restrained from the slave-trade—the favorite traffic of the chiefs—A(opposed in) their marauding propensity, and threatened by the desertion of their slaves and women, who begin to understand that by flight into the towns of the Republic they can free themselves from the domestic institutions of slavery and polygamy, B( it is not probable that) heathen princes and chiefs would be favorable to the government C(which they imagine is operating) detrimentally in these respects toD( its interest).

单选题The word hospice is hundreds of years old. It comes to us from the time called the Middle Ages in Europe. Religious groups then provided hospice as a place where traveler could stay. Sometimes the groups also offered a place for the sick and the dying. Today the word hospice means more than a place. It means a way of caring for the dying. In the modern sense of the word, it means that, if possible, dying people can receive care at home during their last days; and the health-care workers do not try to lengthen the lives of the dying with modern medical equipment. Instead, care-givers make every effort to control or stop the patient's pain. It also means that patients get help for their emotional needs in addition to their physical needs. A British woman Cicely Saunders was the first major activist for hospice care in modern times. Cicely Saunders worked as a nurse in a hospital right after World War II , where she met a man who was dying of cancer. Together they found ideas about the best possible treatment for people who would never get well again. They talked about treatments that would permit patients to discuss their feelings and to take part in activities meaningful to them. They planned a system that would allow dying people to be surrounded by the people and things they loved most. The dying man gave Cicely Saunders enough money to study to become a doctor. By 1967 Dr. Saunders had organized and opened St. Christopher's Hospice in London. In 1974, after the America's first hospice started in New Haven, others followed suit in cities throughout the country. Organizers had a difficult job. They had to teach the public about the idea of hospice. They had to get money from companies, religious groups and citizens. And they had to negotiate with local govermments to use public money to care for the dying. Thanks to their unyielding determination and painstaking efforts, hospice has grown in America. Dr. Jo Magno, the President of the National Hospice Organization, said that working with the dying occasionally made her sad. Yet she remembers the words of Dr. Cicely Saunders— "We can not add days to life, but we can add life to days. "

单选题With scholars from 24 countries______the conference, the committee had a great deal of work to do.

单选题In 1982, Hitachi was indicted for stealing confidential documents from IBM. As part of a court settlement, the company paid IBM hundreds of millions of dollars.

单选题In order to survive now and ______ in the future, all the working staff must constantly create new ideas for every aspect of your business.

单选题Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so ______ at handling people that he was made American Ambassador to France. A. adroit B. shrewd C. considerate D. foxy

单选题Hitler sought to annihilate resistance movements throughout Europe.

单选题 You hear the refrain all the time: the U. S. economy looks good statistically, but it doesn't fed good. Why doesn't ever-greater wealth promote ever-greater happiness.'? It is a quest, ion that dales at least to the appearance in 1958 of The affluent(富裕的)Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently at 97. The Affluent Society is a modem classic because it helped define a new moment in the human condition. For most of history," hunger, sickness, and cold" threatened nearly everyone, Galbraith wrote. "Poverty was found everywhere in that world. Obviously it is not of ours. "After World War Il, the dread of another Great Depression gave way to an economic boom. In the 1930s unemployment had averaged 18. 2 percent; in the 1950s it was 4. 5 percent. To Galbraith, materialism had gone mad and would breed discontent. Through advertising, companies conditioned consumers to buy things they didn't really want or need. Because so much spending was artificial, it would be unfulfilling. Meanwhile, government spending that would make everyone better off was being cut down because people instinctively-and wrongly-labeled government only as "a necessary evil". It's often said that only the rich are getting ahead; everyone else is standing still or falling behind. Well, there are many undeserving rich--overpaid chief executives, for instance. But over any meaningful period, most people's incomes are increasing. From 1995 to 2004, inflation-adjusted average family income rose 14. 3 percent, to $ 43,200. People feel, "squeezed" because their rising incomes often don't satisfy their rising wants--for bigger homes, more health care, more education, faster Internet connections. The other great frustration is that it has not eliminated insecurity. People regard job stability as part of their standard of living. As corporate layoffs increased, that part has eroded. More workers fear they've be- come "the disposable American" ,as Louis Uchitelle puts it in his book by the same name. Because so much previous suffering and social-conflict stemmed from poverty ,the arrival of widespread affluence suggested utopian(乌托邦式的)possibilities. Up to a point, affluence succeeds. There is much less physical misery than before. People are better off. Unfortunately, affluence also creates new complaints and contradictions. Advanced societies need economic growth to satisfy the multiplying wants of their citizens. But the quest for growth lets loose new anxieties and economic conflicts that disturb the social order. Affluence liberates the individual ,promising that everyone can choose a unique way to self-fulfillment. But the promise is so extravagant that it predestines many disappointments and sometimes inspires choices that have anti-social consequences, including family breakdown and obesity (肥胖症). Statistical indicators of happiness have not risen with incomes. Should we be surprised? Not really. We've simply reaffirmed an old truth: the pursuit of affluence does not always end with happiness.

单选题The close relationship between poetry and music scarcely needs to be argued. Both are aural modes which employ rhythm, rime, and pitch as major devices; to these the one adds linguistic meaning, connotation, and various traditional figures, and the other can add, at least in theory, all of these plus harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration techniques. In English the two are closely bound historically. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry seems certainly to have been read or chanted to a harpist"s accompaniment; the verb used in Beowulf for such a performance, the Finn episode, is singan, to sing, and the noun gyd, song. A major source of the lyric tradition in English poetry is the songs of the troubadours. The distance between the gyd in Beowulf and the songs of Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan may seem great, but is one of time rather than aesthetics. The lyric poem as a literary work and the lyrics of a popular song are both still essentially the same thing: poetry. Whether the title of the work be "Gerontion", or "Hound Dog", our criteria for evaluating the work must remain the same. The most important prerequisite for both a significant poem and significant lyrics in a popular song is that the writer be faithful to his own personal vision or to the vision of the poem he is writing. Skill and craft for writing poetry are indeed necessary because these are the only means by which a poet can preserve the integrity of this vision in the poem. A poet must not, either because of lack of skill or because of worship of popularity, wealth, or critical acclaim, go outside of his own or his own poem"s vision—on pain of writing only the derivative or the trivial. Historically, the writers and singers of the lyrics of popular songs have seemed often to be incapable of personal vision, and to have confused both originality and morality with a servile compliance to popular taste.

单选题Don't call him just a college professor. Internet entrepreneur, TV personality, advisor to presidents, and friend to the rich and powerful would be more accurate. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is better known for his activities outside the academy. This week he sold Africana. com, a website he created with a fellow Harvard University professor, to Time Warner. Terms of the deal weren't revealed, though the Wall Street Journal pegged the price at more than $ 10 million, with Gates reaping up to $ 1 million. Time Warner will incorporate the site, a portal with news and information about people of African descent, into America Online when the two merge as expected. The sense is that Gates got a very good deal. The site is a rich source of scholarship but hardly a rich source of revenue. As recently as the late 1980s Gates, who turns 50 this week, was an obscure professor, penning books on literary theory only a graduate student could love. Now he can't be avoided: He hosted a series about Africa on public television, writes occasional articles for the New Yorker, and even advises the Gore presidential campaign. He counts director Steven Spielberg, Microsoft's Bill Gates and President Clinton as friends. "They're not intimate friends," he insists. Indeed, Gates has evolved into a kind of expert on everything African-American. "He remains the go-to person on the state of African-American affairs," said Perry Steinberg, head of American Program Bureau, a lecture agency. The 30 or so speeches Gates delivers each year are another source of income for the professor. With fame comes controversy. Several other black intellectuals have taken him to task for not being confrontational enough. Gates has heard it before. "Me? Critics? Oh, what a shock. " But he considers himself more a descendent of historian and educator W. E. B. Du Bois than of Malcolm X. His ultimate goal is to build the field of Afro-American studies. "Fifty years from now I want there to be at least 10 great centers of Afro-American studies," he says. If working as a consultant on Spielberg's historical film Amistad or giving Al Gore advice helps, so be it.

单选题By using the word "folklore", the author suggests that ______.

单选题If the batik's statement agrees with my bank balance, it does not follow {{U}}indisputably{{/U}} that the balance is correct.

单选题The market for (manufactured goods) is (which) economists call "imperfect," because each company has its own style; and all of the arts of advertisement and salesmanship are devoted (to making) it (even more imperfect) by attracting buyers to particular brand names.

单选题A big problem in learning English as a foreign language is lack of opportunities for______ interaction with proficient speakers of English. A. instantaneous B. provocative C. verbal D. dual

单选题The majority of the US state governments ______.