单选题These machines have been idle for the past month.

单选题What does the word "deteriorated" mean? (in the last line of paragraph 2 )

单选题{{B}}Passage Four{{/B}} Custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than what, any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how unusual. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest. No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probing he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behavior of the individual as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the common language of his family. When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no .social problem it is more obligatory upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.

单选题 Some politicians are scurrying about with much zest and anticipation. It's time, their polls inform them, to find the quick fix for what they have determined is a society plagued by the irregular heartbeat of deficient values. But there are contradictions that intrude on this denunciatory atmosphere. If there are moral omissions in the society, they cannot be sealed by instant, slenderly based attacks on entertainment. The plain fain fact is we are rearranging our priorities in the wrong way. We are today misplacing our energies and our funding by directing all sorts of incentives to high schools and colleges. Too late. The moral scaffolding has been built by then,for better or worse. How then to begin this revision of life conduct? We must introduce inpre-school, and keep alive through grade five, a new school course. The course could be titled, "What is right, and what is plainly wrong". For 30 minutes each day, the teacher would illuminate for these very young children what William Faulkner labeled "the old verities", the words that construct and implement the daily moral grind in every durable society must engage if it is to be judged a "just" society. These are words like duty, honor, service, integrity, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice, plus the clear admonition that violence is wrong. To the teaching of the meaning of those words must be added that cleansing rule of treating other people as you would want them to treat you. And most of all to make sure that these kids understand with growing clarity that home, school and church are the sanctuaries for their later life. There is a grand simplicity to this kind of school course. It enters a child's mind early,burrowing deep into those recesses of the human brain that even today advanced medical science has not been able to penetrate. If you ask enough people, you will find that most of us remember our first-or second-grade teacher. I remember Miss Corbett and Miss Walker, who read to us before we really understood, but the words had weight and allure. We listened and, without really knowing it, we learned and saved what we learned. Perhaps it was because what we heard in those early school years was the first entry into our learning vessel. Absent from this kind of early instruction, absent from the building of this moral shield, no congressional law, no presidential executive order, no fiery rhetoric will salvage a child's conduct nor locate a missing moral core.

单选题Many quarrels have______ through misunderstanding; how to solve them is important.

单选题The people of the village fought for the right to ______ cattle on the grassland.

单选题Western medicine,_______science and practiced by people with academic internationally accepted medical degrees,is only one of many systems of healing.

单选题It is apparent that winning the scholarship is______of one"s intelligence in the field of physics.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} It is hard to predict how science is going to turn out, and if it is really good science it is impossible to predict. If the things to be found are actually new, they are by definition unknown in advance. You cannot make choices in this matter. You either have science or you don't, and if you have it you are obliged to accept the surprising and disturbing pieces of informantion, along with the neat and promptly useful bits. The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. Indeed, I regard this as the major discovery of the past hundred years of biology. It is, in its way, an illuminating piece of news. It would have amazed the brightest minds of the 18th century Enlightenment to be told by any of us how little we know and how bewildering seems the way ahead. It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of the 20th century science and the human intellect, In earlier times, we either pretended to understand how things worked or ignored the problem, or simply made up stories to fill the gaps. Now that we have begun exploring in earnest, we are getting glimpses of how huge the questions are, and how far from being answered. Be- cause of this, we are depressed. It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance, the worst spots and here and there the not-so-bad spots, but no true light at the end of the tunnel nor even any tunnels that can yet be trusted but we are making a beginning and there ought to be some satisfaction. There are probably no questions we call think up that can't be answered, sooner or later, including even the matter of consciousness. To be sure, there may well be questions we can't think up, ever, and therefore limits to the reach of human intellect, but that is another matter. Within our limits, we should be able to work our way through to all our answers if we keep at it long enough, and pay attention.

单选题Both civilization and culture are fairly modern words, having come into prominent use during the 19th century by anthropologists, historians, and literary figures. There has been a strong tendency to use them interchangeably as though they mean the same thing, but they are not the same. Although modern in their usage, the two words derived from ancient Latin. The word civilization is based on the Latin civis, of a city. Thus civilization, in its most essential meaning, is the ability of people to live together harmoniously in cities;, in social groupings. From this definition it would seem that certain insects, such as ants or bees, are also civilized. They live and work together in social groups. So do some microorganisms. But there is more to civilization, and that is what culture brings to it. So, civilization is inseparable from culture. The word culture is derived from the Latin verb colere, "to till the soil". But colere also has a wider range of meanings. It may, like civis, mean inhabiting a town or village. But most of its definitions suggest a process of starting and promoting growth and development. One may cultivate a garden; one may also cultivate one's interests, mind, and abilities. In its modern use the word culture refers to all the positive aspects and achievements of humanity that make mankind different from the rest of the animal world. Culture has grown out of creativity, a characteristic that seems to be unique to human beings. One of the basic and best-known features of civilization and culture is the presence of tools. But more important than their simple existence is that the tools are always being improved and enlarged upon a result of creativity. It took thousands of years from the first wheel to the latest most advanced model of automobile. It is the concept of humans as toolmakers and improvers that differentiates them from other animals. A monkey may use a stick to knock a banana from a tree, but that stick will never, through a monkey's cleverness, be modified into a hook or a ladder. Monkeys have never devised a spoken language, written a book, composed a melody, built a house, or painted a portrait. To say that birds build nests and beavers their dens is to miss the point. People once lived in caves, but their cleverness, imagination and creativity led them to progress beyond caves to buildings.

单选题The answer of the author to the question "Do we need growth for prosperity" is ______

单选题A considerable part of Facebook's appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook's isolation is a grind. What's truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume &750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend-but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee. Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn't being served, everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left talking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated, the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

单选题The disagreement over the trade restrictions could seriously ______ relations between the two countries. A. tumble B. manipulate C. jeopardize D. intimidate

单选题My parents' house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reach- able only by placing a stepladder beneath the trapdoor, and filled with unidentifiable articles too important to be thrown out with the trash but no longer suitable to have at hand. This mysterious space was the memory of the place. After many years all the things deposited in it became, one by one, lost to consciousness. But they were still there, we knew, safely and comfortably stored in the tissues of the house. These days most of us live in smaller, more modern houses or in apartments, and at- tics have vanished. Even the deep closets in which we used to pile things up for temporary forgetting are rarely designed into new homes. Everything now is out in the open, openly acknowledged and displayed, and whenever we grow tired of a memory, an old chair, a trunkful of old letters, they are cast into the dump for burning. This has seemed a healthier way to live, except maybe for the smoke everything out to be looked at, nothing strange hidden under the roof, nothing forgotten because of no place left in impenetrable darkness to forget. Openness is the new lifestyle, no undisclosed belongings, no private secrets. Candor is the rule in architecture. The house is a machine for living, and what kind of machine would hide away its worn-out, deserted parts? But it is in our nature as human beings to clutter, and we long for places set aside, reserved for storage. We tend to accumulate and outgrow possessions at the same time, and it is an endlessly discomforting mental task to keep sorting out the, ones to get rid of. We might, we think, remember them later and find a use for then, and if they are gone for good, off to the dump, this is a source of nervousness. I think it may be one of the reasons we drum our fingers so much these days. We might take a lesson here from what has been learned about our brains in this century. We thought we discovered, first off, the attic, although its existence has been mentioned from time to time by all the people we used to call great writers. What we really found was the trapdoor and a stepladder, and off we clambered, shining flashlights into the corners, vacuuming the dust out of bureau drawers, puzzling over the names of objects, tossing them down to the floor below, and finally paying around fifty dollars an hour to have them cast away for burning.

单选题 The climate of Earth is changing. Climatologists are confident that over the past century, the global average surface temperature has increased by about half a degree Celsius. This warming is thought to be at least partly the result of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests for agriculture. As the global population grows and national economies expand, the global average temperature is expected to continue increasing by an additional 1.0 to 3.5℃ by the year 2100. Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues facing humankind. Understanding the potential impacts of climate change for natural ecosystems is essential if we are going to manage our environment to minimize the negative consequences of climate change and maximize the opportunities that it may offer. Because natural ecosystems are complex, nonlinear systems, it follows that their responses to climate change are likely to be complex. Climate change may affect natural ecosystems in a variety of ways. In the short term, climate change can alter the mix of plant species in land ecosystems such as grasslands. In the long term, climate change has the potential to dramatically alter the geographic distribution of major vegetation types--savannas, forests, and tundra. Climate change can also potentially alter global ecosystem processes, including the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Moreover, changes in these ecosystem processes can affect and be affected by changes in the plant species of the ecosystem and vegetation type. All of the climate change-induced alterations of natural ecosystems affect the services that these ecosystems provide to humans. The global average surface temperature increase of half a degree Celsius observed over the past century has been in part due to differential changes in daily maximum and minimum temperatures, resulting in a narrowing of the diurnal temperature range. Decreases in the diurnal temperature range were first identified in the United States, where large-area trends showed that maximum temperatures have remained constant or increased only slightly, whereas minimum temperature have increased at a faster rate. In this issue, Alward et al. report on the different sensitivities of rangeland plants to minimum temperatures increases.

单选题The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shah (26) the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice (27) the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who (28) that around 50bn tons of meltwater (29) each year and not being replaced by new snowfall. The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made (30) by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps— Greenland and Antarctica—is much (31) than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia (32) most of the discrepancy. Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said, "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia which is not (33) different from zero. " The melting of Himalayan glaciers caused (34) in 2009 when a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mistakenly stated that they would disappear by 2035, instead of 2350. (35) , the scientist who led the new work is clear that while greater uncertainty has been discovered in Asia's highest mountains, the melting of ice caps and glaciers around the world (36) a serious concern. "Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year," said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. "People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before. " His team's study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tons of meltwater overall are added to the world's oceans each year. This is (37) sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, (38) the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean. The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges—sometimes dubbed the "third pole" —are (39) melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period, enough ice was added to the peaks to (40) .

单选题Shares on the stock market have ______ as a result of a worldwide economic downturn.

单选题In the case of mobile phones, change is everything. Recent research indicates that the mobile phone is changing not only our culture, but our very bodies as well. First, let's talk about culture. The difference between the mobile phone and its parent, the fixed-line phone, is that a mobile number corresponds to a person, while a land-line goes to a place. If you call my mobile, you get me. If you call my fixed-line phone, you get whoever answers it. This has several implications. The most common one, however, and perhaps the thing that has changed our culture forever, is the "meeting" influence. People no longer need to make firm plans about when and where to meet. Twenty years ago, a Friday night would need to be arranged in advance. You needed enough time to allow everyone to get from their place of work to the first meeting place. Now, however, a night out can be arranged on the run. It is no longer "see you there at 8", but "text me around 8 and we'll see where we all are" . Texting changes people as well. In their paper, "Insights into the Social and Psychological Effects of SMS Text Messaging", two British researchers distinguished between two types of mobile phone users: the "talkers" and the "texters" —those who prefer voice to text messages and those who prefer text to voice. They found that the mobile phone's individuality and privacy gave texters the ability to express a whole new outer personality. Texters were likely to report that their family would be surprised if they were to read their texts. This suggests that texting allowed texters to present a self-image that differed from the one familiar to those who knew them well. Another scientist wrote of the changes that mobiles have brought to body language. There are two kinds that people use while speaking on the phone. There is the "speakeasy": the head is held high, in a self-confident way, chatting away. And there is the "spacemaker": these people focus on themselves and keep out other people. Who can blame them? Phone meetings get cancelled or reformed and camera-phones intrude on people's privacy. So, it is understandable if your mobile makes you nervous. Perhaps you needn't worry so much. After all, it is good to talk.