单选题The blue, mystic Lake Ellsinore lies in an inland California valley, which is teeming and steaming with hot springs. Rimmed by shaggy mountains whose forested crests are reflected in its clear waters, Lake Ellsinore is the very personification of peace--but on it rests the curse of Tondo. The lake had a colorful history. Much of it lies buried in legend, and it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. There have been stories of underground volcanoes on the lake bottom, erupting, killing fish and discoloring the water. There have been stories of a playful sea serpent that lived in its depths. Long noted for its scenic beauty and health-giving waters, the lake was a famous resort in the Nineties. But long before the first white man had set foot along the shore of the lake, this part of California had been the home of the Soboba Indians. Their chief was Tondo, a stern and unforgiving man. He had a daughter, Morning Star, who was in love with Palo, son of the chief the Pales, a neighboring tribe. The Sobobas and Pales were sworn enemies. For a time the lovers met secretly. Then one day they were discovered by Tondo. His rage was terrible to behold. He forbade the lovers ever to meet again. Morning Star tried in every way to appease her father's anger, to soften his heart toward Palo. But in time she saw that it was useless; that he would never give his consent to their marriage. Vowing that they would never be separated, the Indian maid and her lover walked hand in hand into the lake, as the dreary November sun cast long shadows on the land. They were followed by a group of orphan children whom Morning Star had befriended. All walked into the lake, singing the mournful death song of their people, while Tondo stood on the shore and cursed the lovers, cursed the blue water into which they all walked to their death. Ever since that day it would see that a jinx has been laid over Lake Ellsinore. Old-timers tell of a great upheaval in the lake which caused water to spout into the air like a geyser and turn blood-red. Later, 'it became known that three hundred springs of boiling mud and water were born in the valley during that upheaval. The springs reeked with sulphur. For many years after this phenomenon the lake remained peaceful. Then boats were overturned for an apparent reason, and few of their occupants ever returned to tell the story. This continued for several years. At the same time, strong swimmers dived into the lake never to reappear. In 1833 and again in 1846, fish in the lake suddenly died. In the spring of 1850 came the Battle of the Gnats. They bred in the water of the lake and swarmed over the land. They invaded the countryside until the harassed inhabitants called for help. And in July 1951, the sky-blue waters of the lake vanished like mist before a noonday sun. When the bottom was laid bare there was no trace of a volcano, the bottomless pits, or the other disturbances of legend or fact. The copious winter rains of 1951～1952 have replenished the lake. But what menace does its haunting beauty hold today? For tomorrow? The once mighty Sobobas are few now. But the old men swear that their ancestors still haunt the lake. They nod grizzled head and murmur that the Great Tondo's curse will forever remain upon the lake. Only Time, the wise and silent one, can tell.

单选题His desire to______other people has caused trouble in his family.(2002年上海交通大学考博试题)

单选题Everyone experiences fear during major crisis—such as fires, automobile accidents, etc. Some people even feel very nervous when they fly in airplanes. No matter how hard they try, they cannot lower their anxiety. Some of them enjoy talking about their fears while others resent being asked to discuss their personal feelings. Many are aware that they feel anxious but only a few are conscious of the way they express their tension. Some people try to hide their nervousness: they try to disguise their anxiety by telling jokes. Others become loud and aggressive, attacking people by making them the butt of cruel jokes. Sometimes making someone else the target of jokes is an attempt to control one"s own fears—to master anxiety. A number of factors can be mentioned as important in explaining why some people have a fear of flying: early childhood experiences, general sense of security, fear of heights, trust in others, percentage of alcohol in blood, etc. The memory of a bad experience can sometimes trigger the same fear caused by that experience. Thus, a child might be frightened by the sight of a dog even though he is safe, merely because he once had a bad experience with a dog. A bad experience can be the cue that triggers our fears. But the crucial factor seems to be a feeling of no control. Usually we are able to suppress our feelings so that they do not affect our behavior. But sometimes the tension produced by our fears is so great that we cannot suppress it. At such time we need to discharge the tension by laughing or crying. By smiling foolishly and talking loudly, we are able to repress the rising feeling of fear so that it does not affect the way we behave. Because it is necessary to recognize a problem before it can be solved, admitting that we are afraid is an integral part of the process of mastering our fears.

单选题The discrepancy in the company accounts is so ______ that no auditor could have failed to notice it.

单选题In her 26 years of teaching English, Shannon McGuire has seen countless misplaced commas, misspelled words and sentence fragments. But the instructor at US"s Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge said her job is getting harder every day. "I kid you not, the number of errors that I"ve seen in the past few years have multiplied five times," she said. Experts say email and instant messaging are at least partly to blame for an increasing indifference toward the rules of grammar, spelling and sentence structure. They say the problem is most noticeable in college students and recently graduates. "They used to at least feel guilty (about mistakes)," said Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, D. C. "They didn"t necessarily write a little better, but at least they felt guilty." Ironically, Baron"s latest book, "Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It"s Heading," became a victim of sloppy proofreading. The book"s title is capitalized differently on the cover, spine and title page. "People used to lose their jobs over this," she said. "And now they just say "whatever"." "Whatever" describes Jeanette Henderson"s attitude toward writing. The sophomore at the University of Louisiana at Monroe admits that her reliance on spellcheck has hurt her grades in English class. "Computer has spoiled us," she said. But the family and consumer sciences major believes her future bosses won"t mind the mistakes as much as her professor does. "They"re not going to check semicolons, commas and stuff like that," Henderson said. LSU"s McGuire said she teaches her students to use distinct writing styles that fit their purpose. She emphasizes that there"s the informal language of an email to a friend, but there"s also the well thought out and structured academic or professional style of writing. It"s not just email and instant messaging that are contributing to slack writing habits. Society as a whole is becoming more informal. Casual wear at work used to be reserved for Friday, for example, but is now commonplace at most offices. There"s also a greater emphasis on youth culture, and youth tend to use instant messaging more than adults do. English language has been neglected at different points in history but always rebounds. During Shakespearen times, for example, spelling wasn"t considered important, and early publishers rarely proofread. There will likely be a social force that recognizes the need for clear writing and swings the pendulum back.

单选题Albert Einstein once attributed the creativity of a famous scientist to the fact that he "never went to school, and therefore preserved the rare gift of thinking freely". There is undoubtedly truth in Einstein's observation. Many artists and geniuses seem to view their schooling as a disadvantage. But such a truth is not a criticism of schools. It is the function of schools to civilize, not to train explorers. The explorer is always a lonely individual whether his or her pioneering be in art, music, science, or technology. The creative explorer of unmapped lands shares with the genius what William James described as the "faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way". Insofar as schools teach perceptual patterns they tend to destroy creativity and genius. But if schools could somewhat exist solely to cultivate genius, then society would break down. For the social order demands unity and widespread agreement, both traits are destructive to creativity. There will always be conflict between the demands of society and the impulses of creativity and genius.

单选题He did not want to be ______ by the majority. He felt that various distinguished cultures could offer a greater contribution to progress than a single culture could. A. assimilated B. afflicted C. enraged D. isolated

单选题The great ______ that have influenced the world's thinkers came not from committees but from individuals who groped for the truth in independent research.

单选题Parents with only one child tend to have higher academic______for their child.

单选题In spite of the wide range of reading material specially designed or ______ for language learning purposes, there is yet no effective and systematic program for the reading skills.

单选题Don't trust the speaker any more, since the remarks he made in his lectures are never______ with the facts. A. symmetrical B. comparative C. compatible D. harmonious

单选题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 mil-lions 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 Alerts complaint are: MSN, owned by Microsoft; Netscape, owned by AOL Time Warner; Directhit, owned by Ask Jeeves; HotBot and Lycos, both owned by Term Lycos; AhaVista, 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 be-come central in the quest for learning and knowledge in our society. The ability to skew the results in favor of hucksters 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 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Passage 3 In Death Valley, California, one of the hottest, most arid places in North America, there is much salt, and salt can damage rocks impressively. Inhabitants of areas elsewhere, where streets and highways are salted to control ice, are familiar with the resulting rust and deterioration on cars. That attests to the chemically corrosive nature of salt, but it is not the way salt destroys rocks. Salt breaks rocks apart principally by a process called crystal prying and wedging. This happens not by soaking the rocks in salt water, but by moistening their bottoms with salt water. Such conditions exist in many areas along the eastern edge of central Death Valley. There, salty water rises from the groundwater table by capillary action through tiny spaces in sediment until it reaches the surface. Most stones have capillary passages that suck salt water from the wet ground. Death Valley provides an ultra-dry atmosphere and high daily temperatures, which promote evaporation and the formation of salt crystals along the cracks or other opening within stones. These crystals grow as long as salt water is available. Like tree roots breaking up a sidewalk, the growing crystals exert pressure on the rock and eventually pry the rock apart along planes of weakness, such as banding in metamorphic rocks, bedding in sedimentary rocks, or preexisting or incipient fractions, and along boundaries between individual mineral crystals or grains. Besides crystal growth, the expansion of halite crystals (the same as everyday table salt) by heating and of sulfates and similar salts by hydration can contribute additional stresses. A rock durable enough to have withstood natural conditions for a very long time in other areas could probably be shattered into small pieces by salt weathering within a few generations. The dominant salt in Death Valley is halite, or sodium chloride, but other salts, mostly carbonates and sulfates, also cause prying and wedging, as does ordinary ice. Weathering by a variety of salts, though often subtle, is a worldwide phenomenon. Not restricted to arid regions, intense salt weathering occurs mostly in salt-rich places like the seashore, near the large saline lakes in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, and in desert sections of Australia, New Zealand, and central Asia.

单选题What small businesses need to learn from larger competitors is how developing a dynamic learning environment______innovation, strengthens market position, and develops a true competitive advantage. A. propels B. restrains C. prescribes D. improvises

单选题His elder sister, who works in the supermarket, is still {{U}}on the shelf{{/U}}.

单选题Through microscopes people can see objects that are ______to the naked eyes.

单选题 In recent weeks both housing and stock prices have started to retreat from their irrationally amazing highs.

单选题______ Mr. Hall admits that he pushed too hard, and ultimately his efforts failed.

单选题Everything seemed so ______ that it was difficult to suspect that it was a lie. A. plausible B. judicious C. far-fetched D. insistent

单选题The increasing A(popularity) of the motorcycle as a B(convenience), economical C(form) of transportation has been D(just short) of astounding.