单选题The relationship between formal education and economic growth in poor countries is widely misunderstood by economists and politicians alike. Progress in both areas is undoubtedly necessary for the social, political and intellectual development of these and all other societies; however, the conventional view that education should be one of the very highest priorities for promoting rapid economic development in poor countries is wrong. We are fortunate that it is, because building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance would require two or three generations. The findings of a research institution have consistently shown that workers in all countries can be trained on the job to achieve radical higher productivity and, as a result, radically higher standards of living. Ironically, the first evidence for this idea appeared in the United States. Not long ago, with the country entering a recession and Japan at its pre-bubble peak, the U. S. workforce was derided as poorly educated and one of the primary causes of the poor U. S. economic performance. Japan was, and remains, the global leader in automotive-assembly productivity. Yet the research revealed that the U. S. factories of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota achieved about 95 percent of the productivity of their Japanese counterparts as a result of the training that U. S. workers received on the job. More recently, while examining housing construction, the researchers discovered that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican workers in Houston, Texas, consistently met best-practice labor productivity standards despite the complexity of the building industry's work. What is the real relationship between education and economic development? We have to suspect that continuing economic growth promotes the development of education even when governments don't force it. After all, that's how education got started. When our ancestors were hunters and gatherers 10, 000 years ago, they didn't have time to wonder much about anything besides finding food. Only when humanity began to get its food in a more productive way was there time for other things. As education improved, humanity's productivity potential increased as well. When the competitive environment pushed our ancestors to achieve that potential, they could in turn afford more education. This increasingly high level of education is probably a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the complex political systems required by advanced economic performance. Thus poor countries might not be able to escape their poverty traps without political changes that may be possible only with broader formal education. A lack of formal education, however, doesn't constrain the ability of the developing world's workforce to substantially improve productivity for the foreseeable future. On the contrary, constraints on improving productivity explain why education isn't developing more quickly there than it is.

单选题 An orator, whose purpose is to persuade men, must speak the things they wish to hear, an orator, whose purpose is to move men, must also avoid disturbing the emotional effect by any obtrusion of intellectual antagonism, but an author, whose purpose is to instruct men, who appeals to the intellect, must be careless of their opinions and think only of truth. It will often be a question when a man is or is not wise in advancing an unpalatable opinion, or in preaching heresies. But it can never be a question that a man should be silent if unprepared to speak the truth as he conceives it. Deference to popular opinion is one great source of bad writing and is all the more disastrous because the deference is paid to some purely hypothetical requirement. When a man fails to see the truth of certain generally accepted views, there is no law compelling him to provoke animosity by announcing his dissent. He may be excused if he shrink from the lurid glory of martyrdom. He may be justified in not placing himself in a position of singularity. He may even be commended for not helping to perplex mankind with doubts which he feels to be founded on limited and possibly erroneous investigation. But if allegiance to truth lays no stern command upon him to speak out his immature dissent, it does lay a stern command not to speak out hypocritical assent. There are many justifications of silence, there can be none of insincerity.

单选题Based on their review, the University of California researchers concluded that MTBE is an animal virus ______ cause cancer in humans.

单选题The captain of the ship entered the details in the ______. A. lounge B. log C. motel D. shipwreck

单选题Veteran track trainer Johnson is scathing in his ______ of the leaders of the I. O. C. , "These people are megalomaniacs. They are power-hungry administrators. " A. heredity B. helicopter C. appraisal D. flame

单选题After so many nights of ______, Mrs. Constable decided that she really must see a doctor. She could not continue to lie awake, night after night, worrying about her health.

单选题Cancer cells destroy not only all rival cells, in their ruthless biological warfare, but also destroy the larger organization—the body itself—signing their own suicide warrant.

单选题Ironically, the intellectual tools currently being used by the political right to such harmful effect originated on the academic left. In the 1960s and 1970s a philosophical movement called postmodernism developed among humanities professors 1 being deposed by science, which they regarded as right-leaning. Postmodernism 2 ideas from cultural anthropology and relativity theory to argue that truth is 3 and subject to the assumptions and prejudices of the observer. Science is just one of many ways of knowing, they argued, neither more nor less 4 than others, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or women. 5 , they defined science as the way of knowing among Western white men and a tool of cultural 6 . This argument 7 with any feminists and civil-rights activists and became widely adopted, leading to the "political correctness" justifiably 8 by Rush Limbaugh and the-"mental masturbation" lampooned by Woody Allen. Acceptance of this relativistic worldview 9 democracy and leads not to tolerance but to authoritarianism. John Locke, one of Jefferson"s "trinity of three greatest men," showed 10 almost three centuries ago. Locke watched the arguing factions of Protestantism, each claiming to be the one true religion, and asked: How do we know something to be true? What is the basis of knowledge? In 1689 he 11 what knowledge is and how it is grounded in observations of the physical world in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Any claim that fails this test is "but faith, or opinion, but not knowledge." It was this idea—that the world is knowable and that objective, empirical knowledge is the most 12 basis for public policy that stood as Jefferson"s foundational argument for democracy. By falsely 13 knowledge with opinion, postmodernists and antiscience conservatives alike collapse our thinking back to a pre-Enlightenment era, leaving no common basis for public policy. Public discourse is 14 to endless warring opinions, none seen as more valid than another. Policy is determined by the loudest voices, reducing us to a world in which might 15 right—the classic definition of authoritarianism.

单选题Prof. Harkins gave his audience a vivid______ of his lecturing tour in the United States.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} Attacking an increasingly popular Internet business practice, a consumer watchdog group Monday filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, asserting that many online search engines are concealing the impact special fees have on search results by Internet users. Commercial Alert, a 3-year-old group founded by consumer activist Ralph Nader, asked the FTC to investigate whether eight of the Web's largest search engines are violating federal laws against deceptive advertising. The group said that the search engines are abandoning objective formulas, to determine the order of their listed results and selling the top spots to the highest bidders without making adequate disclosures to Web surfers. The complaint touches a hot-button issue affecting tens of millions of people who submit search queries each day. With more than 2 billion pages and more than 14 billion hyperlinks on the Web, search requests rank as the second most popular online activity after E-mail. The eight search engines named in Commercial Alert's complaint are. MSN, owned by Microsoft; Netscape, owned by AOL Time Warner; Directhit, owned by Ask Jeeves; HotBot and Lycos, both owned by Terra Lycos; Altavista, owned by CMGI; LookSmart, owned by LookSmart; and Iwon, owned by a privately held company operating under the same name. Portland, Ore. -based Commercial Alert could have named more search engines in its complaint, but focused on the biggest sites that are auctioning off spots in their results, said Gary Ruskin, the group's executive director. "Search engines have become central in the quest for learning and knowledge in our society. The ability to skew (扭曲) the results in favor of hucksters (小贩) without telling consumers is a serious problem," Ruskin said. By late Monday afternoon, three of the search engines had responded to The Associated Press' inquiries about the complaint. Two, LookSmart and AltaVista, denied the charges. Microsoft spokesman Matt Pilla said MSN is delivering" compelling search results that people want." The FTC had no comment about the complaint Monday. The complaint takes aim at the new business plans embraced by more search engines as they try to cash in on their pivotal (关键的) role as Web guides and reverse a steady stream of losses. To boost revenue, search engines in the past year have been accepting payments from businesses interested in receiving a higher ranking in certain categories or ensuring that their sites are reviewed more frequently.

单选题Obviously these are all factors affecting smooth operation, but the underlying problem is still to be identified.

单选题The prodigal son spent his money {{U}}extravagantly{{/U}} and soon after he left home he was reduced to a beggar.

单选题One outcome of the rapid advance of technology is the breakdown of the traditional ______ of labor between the sexes.

单选题The 215-page manuscript, circulated to publishers last October, ______ an outburst of interest. A. flared B. glittered C. sparked D. flashed

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} There are 5 reading passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice and mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding letter in the brackets. Tides are created mainly by the pull of the moon on the earth. The moon's pull causes water in the oceans to be a little deeper at a point closest to the moon and also at a point farthest from the moon, on the opposite side of the earth. These two tidal "waves" follow the apparent movement of the moon around the earth strike nearly every coastline at intervals of about twelve hours and twenty-five minutes. After reaching a high point, the water level goes down gradually for a little more than six hours and then begins to rise toward a new high point. Hence, most coastlines have two tides a day, and the tides occur fifty minutes later each day. Differences in the coastline and in channels in the ocean bottom may change the time that the tidal wave reaches different points along the same coastline. The difference in water level between high and low tide varies from day to day according to the relative positions of the sun and the moon because the sun also exerts a pull on the earth, although it is only about half as strong as the pull of the moon. When the sun and the moon are pulling along the same line, the tides rise higher, and when they pull at right angles to one another, the tide is lower. The formation of the coastline and variations in the weather are additional factors which can affect the height of tides. Some sections of the coast are shaped in such a way as to cause much higher tides than are experienced in other areas. A strong wind blowing toward the shore may also cause tides to be higher.

单选题Why is there ______ traffic on the streets today than yesterday?

单选题Adverse reviews in the New York press may greatly Change the prospects of a new Broadway production.

单选题In the U. S. A. many communities and church groups ______ social centers for old people.

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. This 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, it 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 portion 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%.