单选题His parents began to ______ a small sum of money every month for his college education when he was still a little child. A. put up B. lay down C. set aside D. place apart

单选题The work confirms hints A(that) had already been emerging in the scientific literature in recent years that p53 and related proteins might play an important role in life, but the new paper is B(far more detailed)—and, scifientists say, more compelling—C(that) anything D(published previously).

单选题There are a few small things that I don't like about my job, but ______it's very enjoyable. A.all at once B.once and for all C.so much as D.by and large

单选题Generous public funding of basic science would ______ considerable benefits for the country's health, wealth and security. A. lead to B. result from C. lie in D. settle down

单选题Even when textbooks are ______ through a school system, methods of teaching may vary greatly.

单选题The skeleton of a primitive bird that was recently discovered indicated that this ancient creature ______today's birds in that, unlike earlier birds and unlike reptilian ancestors, it had not a tooth in its head.

单选题Passing the English exam should ______ your chances of getting the post.

单选题Japanese workers still put in an impressive 42 hours each week but they are ______ by the South Koreans and Singaporeans who spend an average 46 hours at the grindstone.

单选题Agriculture must, therefore,______ workers and savings to the new industrialized, urbanized sectors if a modern economy is to be achieved.(2004年西南财经大学考博试题)

单选题The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on whether photography's fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art, as distinct from merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was instead a privileged way of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and no less worthy an art than painting. Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves--anything but making works of art. In the nineteen century, photography' s association with the real world placed it in an ambivalent relation to art; late in the twentieth century, an ambivalent relation exists because of the Modernist heritage in art. That important photographers are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art, shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art. Photographers' disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried slaws of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity--in short, an art.

单选题It's a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers' misfortunes. Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn , among other things, that you might — surprise — fall off. The label on a child's Batman cape cautions that the toy "does not enable user to fly". While warnings are often appropriate and necessary — the dangers of drug interactions, for example — and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn't clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court. Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn't have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. "We' re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren't designed to prevent those kinds of injuries," says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete's injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute — a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight — issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities, " says a law professor at Cornell Law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate demand of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.

单选题We must ______ on our reputation to expand the business. A. improve B. build C. develop D. weigh

单选题 This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Alar apple scare, in which many American consumers were driven into a panic following the release of a report by an environmental organization claiming that apples containing the chemical Alar posed a serious health threat to preschoolers. The report was disseminated through a PR (Problem Report) campaign and bypassed any legitimate form of scientific peer review. Introduced to the American public by CBS "60 Minutes", the unsubstantiated claims in the report led some school districts to remove apples from their school lunch programs and unduly frightened conscientious parents trying to develop good eating habits for their children. Last month, Consumers Union released a report warning consumers of the perils of consuming many fruits and vegetables that frequently contained "unsafe" levels of pesticide residues. This was especially true for children, they claimed. Like its predecessor 10 years earlier, the Consumers Union report received no legitimate scientific peer review and the public's first exposure to it was through news coverage. Not only does such reporting potentially drive children for consuming healthful fruits and vegetables, the conclusions were based on a misleading interpretation of what constitutes a "safe" level of exposure. Briefly, the authors used values known as the "chronic reference doses", set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as their barometers of safety. Used appropriately, these levels represent the maximum amount of pesticide thatcould be consumed daily for life without concern. For a 70-year lifetime, for example, consumers would have to ingest this average amount of pesticide every day for more than25000 days. It is clear, as the report points out, that there are days on which kids may be exposed to more; it is also clear that there are many more days when exposure is zero. Had the authors more appropriately calculated the cumulative exposures for which the safety standards are meant to apply, there would have been no risks and no warnings. Parents should feel proud, rather than guilty, of providing fruits and vegetables for their children. It is well established that a diet rich in such foods decreases the risk of heart disease and cancer. Such benefits dramatically overwhelm the theoretical risks of tiny amounts of pesticides in food. So keep serving up the peaches, apples, squash, grapes and pears.

单选题Body paint or face paint is used mostly by men in preliterate societies in order to attract good health or to ______ disease. [A] set aside [B] ward off [C] shrug off [D] give away

单选题The primary purpose of this passage is to______

单选题 EI Nino is the term used for the period when sea surface temperatures are above normal off the South American coast along the equatorial Pacific, sometimes called the Earth's heartbeat, and is a dramatic but mysterious climate system that periodically rages across the Pacific. El Nino means "the little boy" or "the Christ child" in Spanish, and is so called because its warm current is felt along coastal Peru and Ecuador around Christmas. But the local warming is just part of an intricateset of changes in the ocean and atmosphere across the tropical Pacific, which covers a third of the Earth's circumference. Its intensity is such that it affects temperatures, storm tracks and rainfall around the world. Droughts in Africa and Australia, tropical storms in the Pacific, torrential rains along the Californian coast and lush greening of Peruvian deserts have all been ascribed to the whim of EI Nino. Until recently it has been returning about every three to five years. But recently it has become more frequent--for the first time on record it has returned for a fourth consecutive year--and at the same time a giant pool of unusually warm water has settled down in the middle of the Pacific and is showing no signs of moving. Climatologists don't yet know why, though some are saying these aberrations may signal a worldwide change in climate. The problem is that nobody really seems sure what causes the EI Nino to start, and what makes some stronger than others. And this makes it particularly hard to explain why it as suddenly started behaving so differently. In the absence of EI Nino and its cold counterpart, La Nina, conditions in the tropical eastern Pacific are the opposite of those in the west: the east is cool and dry, while the west is hot and wet. In the east, it's the winds and currents that keep things cool. It works like this. Strong, steady winds, called trade winds, blowing west across the Pacific drag the surface water along with them. The varying influence of the Earth's rotation at different latitudes, known as the Coriolis effect, causes these surface winds and water to veer towards the poles, north in the northern hemisphere and south in the southern hemisphere. The surface water is replaced by colder water from deeper in the ocean in a process known as upwelling. The cold surface water in mm chills the air above it. This cold dense air cannot rise high enough or water vapor to condense into clouds. The dense air creates an area of high pressure so that the atmosphere over the equatorial eastern Pacific is essentially devoid of rainfall.

单选题As it turned out to be a small house party, we______so formally.(北京大学2008年试题)

单选题The shopping-bag ladies know the hours when restaurants put their leftovers in the ______ cans where they search for food.

单选题Under the teacher's stern_____, the little boy broke down and confessed to cheating.

单选题There is a range of activities which require movements of about one to four or five miles. These might be leisure activities, such as moving from home to swimming pool, tennis club, the theater or other cultural centers, or to a secondary or more advanced school, or they might be movements associated with work and shopping in the central areas of cities. The use of cars capable of carrying five people at 80 mph for satisfying these needs is wasteful of space and most productive of disturbance to other road users. The use of the bicycle, or some more modern derivative of it, is probably worth more consideration than has recently been given to it. The bicycle itself is a remarkably efficient and simple device for using human muscular energy for transportation. In pure energy terms, it is four to five times as efficient as walking, even though human walking itself is twice as efficient as the movement of effective animals such as dogs or gulls. It is still widely used, not only in some developing countries where bicycles are major means of people and goods, but in a few richer towns such as Amsterdam in Holland and Cambridge in England. It usually gives inadequate protection from the weather, is not very suitable for carrying goods, and demands considerable muscular work to make progress against wind or uphill. It also offers its rider no protection against collisions with other vehicles. All these difficulties could, however, be greatly eliminated, if not removed, with relatively small changes in design. The whole machine could be enclosed in a plastic bubble which would provide some protection in case of accidents. It would be easy to add a small petrol or electric motor. A wide variety of designs would be possible. As in rowing, we might employ the power of the arms or the general body musculature, as well as those of the legs; more muscular exercise would be good for the health of many people in cities, and a wide use of bicycle like muscle-powered vehicles would be a useful way to ensure this. It could also provide ample opportunities for showing off by the young and vigorous.