单选题The modern university is the ideal environment for the creation and transfer of knowledge that drives national competitiveness in an increasingly global era. Its most effective form is the American adaptation of the European model, in which teaching, leaning and research are integrated into a single institution. Indeed, the American university has proved capable of almost anything, from developing advanced economic theories to creating new life forms. Many national leaders understand that the university is the critical catalyst for America's adaptability, economic robustness and emergence as a great power. And they are moving aggressively to catch up. The universities created by emerging economies beginning in the 1990s and through 2020 will likely play a decisive role in reshaping the global balance of economic power. That is bad news for the United States. The past two decades of American university development have been characterized largely by self-satisfaction arising from steady progress by the top 20 or so research universities. And America as a nation has 1Seen coasting. Since 2000, the United States has lost its edge in the graduation of engineers and technologists. The country no longer dominates scientific discovery, innovation or exploration. Most important, the United States has not launched any effort to build new institutions to accommodate its increasingly diverse population of more than 300 million. The result is that America's university system, despite its historical pre-eminence, has ceased to grow. Furthermore, America's university system has failed to adapt to the dramatic demographic shifts occurring as a result of social mobility and immigration. America needs to realize that its universities face real competition from the rest of the world to attract the best and the brightest, to secure resources and to provide environments that educate and inspire. This is not to say that the best American universities are no longer the leaders in discovery and innovation. It is to say that the success of the higher-education system must be measured by more than just innovations. Its long-term performance depends on its ability to provide learning to a broad cross sections of citizens, to advance national proficiency in math and science and to create an adaptable work force, as well as to develop a national appreciation for discovery, entrepreneurship and the creative process. In China and elsewhere, these are the goals of the new universities being built. In the United States, we need to move from a national self-confidence based on past success to one built on the knowledge that we are advancing a system of higher education that will meet our future needs. This will require that policymakers, business leaders and universities rededicate themselves to creating comprehensive learning and discovery environments; design entirely new models and methods for teaching, and then take action to implement them.

单选题Nuclear weapons were first developed in the United States during the Second World War, to be used against Germany. However, by the time the first bombs were ready for use, the war with Germany had ended and, as a result, the decision was made to use the weapons against Japan instead. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have suffered the consequences of this decision to the present day. The real reasons why bombs were dropped on two heavily-populated cities are not altogether clear. A number of people in 1944 and early 1945 argued that the use of nuclear weapons would be unnecessary, since American Intelligence was aware that some of the most powerful and influential people in Japan had already realized that the war was lost, and wanted to negotiate a Japanese surrender. It was also argued that, since Japan has few natural resources, a blockade by the American navy would force it to surrender within a few weeks, and the use of nuclear weapons would thus prove unnecessary. If a demonstration of force was required to end the war, a bomb could be dropped over an unpopulated area like a desert, in front of Japanese observers, or over an area of low population inside Japan, such as a forest. Opting for this course of action might minimize the loss of further lives on all sides, while the power of nuclear weapons would still be adequately demonstrated. All of these arguments were rejected, however, and the general consensus was that the quickest way to end the fighting would be to use nuclear weapons against canters of population inside Japan. In fact, two of the more likely reasons why this decision was reached seem quite shocking to us now. Since the beginning of the Second World War both Germany and Japan had adopted a policy of genocide (i. e. killing as many people as possible, including civilians). Later on, even the US and Britain had used the strategy of fire bombing cities ( Dresden and Tokyo, for example) in order to kill, injure and intimidate as many civilians as possible. Certainly, the general public in the West had become used to hearing about the deaths of large numbers of people, so the deaths of another few thousand Japanese, who were the enemy in any case, would not seem particularly unacceptable--a bit of "justifiable" revenge for the Allies' own losses, perhaps. The second reason is not much easier to comprehend. Some of the leading scientists in the world had collaborated to develop nuclear weapons, and this development had resulted in a number of major advances in technology and scientific knowledge. As a result, a lot of normal, intelligent people wanted to see nuclear weapons used; they wanted to see just how destructive this new invention could be. It no doubt turned out to be even more "effective" than they had imagined.

单选题The expression "to debase humankind' in par

单选题President Bush takes to the bully pulpit to deliver a stern lecture to America's business elite. The Justice Dept. stuns the accounting profession by filing a criminal indictment of Arthur Andersen LLP for destroying documents related to its audits of Enron Corp. On Capitol Hill, some congressional panels push on with biased hearings on Enron's collapse and, now, another busted New Economy star, telecom's Global Crossing. Lawmakers sign on to new bills aimed at tightening oversight of everything from pensions and accounting to executive pay. To any spectators, it would be easy to conclude that the winds of change are sweeping Corporate America, led by George W. Bush, who ran as "a reformer with result." But far from deconstructing the corporate world brick by brick into something cleaner, sparer, and stronger, Bush aides and many legislators are preparing modest legislative and administrative reforms. Instead of an overhaul, Bush's team is counting on its enforcers, Justice and a newly empowered Securities & Exchange Commission, to make examples of the most egregious offenders. The idea is that business will quickly get the message and clean up its own act. Why won't the outraged rhetoric result in more changes? For starters, the Bush Administration warns that any rush to legislate corporate behavior could produce a raft of flawed bills that raise costs without halting abuses. Business has striven to drive the point home with an intense lobbying blitz that has convinced many lawmakers that over-regulation could startle the stock market and perhaps endanger the nascent economic recovery. All this sets the stage for Washington to get busy with predictably modest results. A surge of caution is sweeping would-be reformers on the Hill. "They know they don't want to make a big mistake," says Jerry J. Jasinowski, president of the National Association of Manufacturers. That go-slow approach suits the White House. Aides say the President, while personally disgusted by Enron's sellout of its pensioners, is reluctant to embrace new sanctions that frustrate even law-abiding corporations and create a litigation bonanza for trial lawyers. Instead, the White House will push for narrowly targeted action, most of it carried out by the SEC, the Treasury Dept. , and the Labor Dept. The right outcome, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill said on Mar. 15, "depends on the Congress not legislating things that are over the top." To O'Neill and Bush, that means enforcing current laws before passing too many new ones. Nowhere is that stance clearer than in the Andersen indictment. So the Bush Administration left the decision to Justice Dept. prosecutors rather than White House political operatives or their reformist fellows at the SEC.

单选题The most favorable business ecology in Silicon Valley is characterized by

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The moral high ground has always been female territory. Men, after all, lie and cheat and rob and pollute the environment and disproportionately populate the prisons, while women do their best to appreciate their good qualities. Some women, at least. But with the rise of feminism, the assaults on men's moral probity have become more frequent, and the belief in their arrogance and lack of concern for anything but their own selfish ends has become a truism. It's the men who are greedy. It's the men who are disloyal. It's the men who will do anything for money. It's the men who are immature. In the world of sport, pouty male athletes are Whipping boys of talk radio. They have graced the cover of Sports Illustrate, and on the inside have been vilified for a litany d sins, among them greed, disdain for the fans who pay their exorbitant salaries, and a lack of respect for the game that the fans love and that has made them rich. Female athletes, on the other hand, have been placed on a pedestal--but it has been a pretty easy one to climb. For one thing, there hasn' t been enough money to get greedy about. For another, there haven' t been any fans. And for third, those who didn't love the game had absolutely no reason to keep playing. But thanks to the rise of women' s basketball, female basketball players are going to find themselves tempted by the same vanities that have seduced so many men- and though we know some will give in, we don' t know how many. For women's basketball to become a major sport in America, as opposed to a profitable one like arena football, something is going to be offered other than just pure skill. That something should be, and if fact will have to be, a different attitude, a purer sense of sport, than the men deliver. It may be asking too much of women to withstand the temptations that have sucked male athletes into prima donna poses, but then again it may be true that women have occupied the high moral ground for so long because they actually are more sensitive to what's important in the long run. I honestly don' t know how this drama will play out, but the process will tell us about more than just the fate of women' s basketball. If women, who are steadily gaining more and more control in this world, 'can truly respond in a more reasoned way to the pull of power, then there is hope for the 21st century. But if women, as a gender, can do no hatter than men when given the chance, then in basketball as in life, we can only look ahead to more of the same.

单选题Anyone who doubts that children are born with a healthy amount of ambition need spend only a few minutes with a baby eagerly learning to walk or a headstrong toddler starting to talk. No matter how many times the little ones stumble in their initial efforts, most keep on trying, determined to master their amazing new skill. It is only several years later, around the start of middle or junior high school, many psychologists and teachers agree, that a good number of kids seem to lose their natural drive to succeed and end up joining the ranks of underachievers. It’s not quite that simple. “Kids can be given the opportunities to become passionate about a subject or activity, but they can’t be forced, ” says Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who led a landmark, 25-year study examining what motivated first grade students in three school districts. Even so, a growing number of educators and psychologists do believe it is possible to unearth ambition in students who don’t seem to have much. They say that by instilling confidence, encouraging some risk taking, being accepting of failure and expanding the areas in which children may be successful, both parents and teachers can reignite that innate desire to achieve. Figuring out why the fire went out is the first step. Assuming that a kid doesn’t suffer from an emotional or learning disability, or isn’t involved in some family crisis at home, many educators attribute a sudden lack of motivation to a fear of failure or peer pressure that conveys the message that doing well academically some how isn’t cool. “Kids get so caught up in the moment-to-moment issue of will they look smart or dumb, and it blocks them from thinking about the long term,” says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford. “You have to teach them that they are in charge of their intellectual growth and that their intelligence is malleable. ” Howard (a social psychologist and president of the Efficacy Institute, an organization that works with teachers and parents to help improve children’s academic performance) and other educators say it’s important to expose kids to a world beyond homework and tests, through volunteer work, sports, hobbies and other extracurricular activities. “The crux of the issue is that many students experience education as irrelevant to their life goals and ambitions, ” says Michael Nakkual, a Harvard education professor who runs a Boston-area mentoring program which works to get low-income underachievers in touch with their aspirations. The key to getting kids to aim higher at school is to disabuse them of the notion that classwork is irrelevant, to show them how doing well at school can actually help them fulfill their dreams beyond it. Like any ambitious toddler, they need to understand that you have to learn to walk before you can run.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Generally a saving in energy consumption is insufficient incentive for the consumer to purchase new cooking equipment unless other improvements (e.g. shorter cooking periods, fewer cleaning difficulties and improved appearance) are available as well. For the individual, there is a natural reticence to incur rapid changes because of the valid economic desire to exploit existing capital investment to the maximum: this is the major problem with many proposed energy-thrift measures. However, caterers should' appreciate that by reducing energy wastages; they will not only be saving money, but also improving the working environment within their kitchens. Retro-fitting existing cookers with energy-conservation improvements in order to raise achievable efficiencies will occur only rarely. For the most immediate significant impact nationally, with respect to reducing the energy expended upon cooking, better management is recommended. Lawson suggested that about 16 PJ per year could be saved in the British catering sector by adopting improved operational practices. If only 10% of the energy used for catering purposes in the domestic sector could also be saved, overall national savings would amount to approximately 44 PJ per annum. To achieve this aim, a comprehensive and straight-forward program of energy-thrift education for housewives, cooks and kitchen managers is needed. This will require all concerned to exercise considerable personal discipline. The present approach, whereby individuals make purchasing decisions mainly on visual and first-cost grounds-partly because the cooking appliance and food manufacturing industries rarely provide adequate scientific data to support their claims- should be supplemented by other considerations. Food is too fundamental to human life, health and happiness to be considered an unworthy subject by intellectuals. For example, even the typical Briton (who tends to be casual about eating compared with most of his foreign counterparts) spends between 5% and 13% of his waking hours preparing, cooking and/or cleaning away 'after meals. Nevertheless, energy wastage prevails both on a national scale ( e. g. storing vast quantities of food at sub-ambient temperatures in so-called food mountains); and on an individual scale (e. g. performing hob operations without placing lids on the pans employed) .

单选题According to the passage, truth

单选题The key difference between human and plant competition for survival is that______.

单选题A statement not made or implied in the text is that

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} One of the many theories about alcoholism is the learning and reinforcement theory, which explains alcoholism by considering alcohol drinking as a reflex response to some stimulus and as a way to reduce an inner drive state such as fear or anxiety. Characterizing life situations in terms of approach and avoidance, this theory holds that persons tend to be drawn to pleasant situations or repelled by unclean, sanity ones. In the latter case, alcohol drinking is said to reduce the tension or feelings of unpleasantness and to replace them with the feeling of pleasure generally observed in most persons after they have consumed one or more drinks. Some experimental evidence tends to show that alcohol reduces fear in an approach-avoidance situation. Conger trained one group of rats to approach a food goal and trained another group to avoid electric shock. After an injection of alcohol the pull away from the shock was measurably weaker, while the pull toward food was unchanged. The obvious troubles experienced by alcoholic persons appear to contradict the learning theory in the explanation of alcoholism. The discomfort, pain, and punishment they experience should presumably discourage the alcoholics from drinking. The fact that alcoholic persons continue to drink in the face of family discord, loss of job, and illness is explained by the proximity of the drive of reduction to the consumption of alcohol; that is, alcohol has the immediate effect of reducing tension while the unpleasant consequences of drunken behavior came only later. The learning pattern, therefore, favors the establishment and repetition of the resort to alcohol. In fact, the anxieties and feelings of guilt caused by the consequences of excessive alcohol drinking may themselves become the signal for another time of alcohol abuse. The way in which the desire for another drink could be caused by anxiety is explained by the process of stimulus generalization: conditions or events securing at the time of reinforcement tend to acquire all the features of stimuli. When alcohol is consumed in association with a state of anxiety or leer, the emotional state itself takes on the properties of a stimulus, thus triggering another time of drinking. The role of punishment is becoming increasingly important in explaining a cause of alcoholism based on the principles of learning theory. While punishment may serve to suppress a response, experiments have shown that in some cases it can serve as a reward and reinforce the behavior. Thus if the alcoholic person has learned to drink under conditions of both reward and punishment, either type of condition may trigger renewed drinking.

单选题By using the expression "pump priming" as a description of public works projects, the author implies that it______

单选题Everyday some 16m barrels of oil leave the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. That is enough to fill a soft-drink can for everyone on earth, or to power every motor vehicle on the planet for 25 miles (40kin). Gulf oil accounts for 40% of global trade in the sticky stuff. More important, it makes up two-thirds of known deposits. Whereas at present production rates the rest of the world's oil reserves will last for a mere 25 years, the Gulf's will last for 100. In other words, the region's strategic importance is set to grow and grow. Or at least so goes the conventional wisdom, which is usually rounded out with scary talk of unstable supplies, spendthrift regimes and a potential fundamentalist menace. Yet all those numbers come with caveats. A great deal of oil is consumed by the countries that produce it rather than traded, so in reality the Gulf accounts for less than a quarter of the world's daily consumption. As for reserves, the figures are as changeable as a mirage in the desert. The most comprehensive research available, conducted by the US Geological Survey, refers to an "expected" total volume for global hydrocarbon deposits that is about double current known reserves. Using that figure, and throwing in natural gas along with oil, it appears that the Gulf contains a more moderate 30% or so of the planet's future fossil-fuel supplies. Leaving out the two Gulf states that are not covered in this survey--Iran and Iraq--the remaining six between them hold something like 20% of world hydrocarbon reserves, not much more than Russia. All the same, it is still a hefty chunk; enough, you might think, to keep the people living atop the wells in comfort for the foreseeable future. But you might be wrong. At present, the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council have a combined national income roughly equal to Switzerland's, but a population which, at around 30m, is more than four times as big. It is also the fastest-growing on earth, having increased at nine times the Swiss rate over the past quarter-century. Meanwhile the region's share of world oil trade has fallen, as has the average price per barrel. As a result, the income per person generated by GCC oil exports has been diminishing since the 1970s. True, surging demand from America and Asia has recently boosted the Gulf's share of trade, but the medium-term outlook for oil pries remains weak. Combined with continued growth in oil consumption, this should create sustained upward pressure on prices. And high oil prices will speed the search for alternatives. Who knows, in 20 years' time fuel cells and hydrogen power may have started to become commercial propositions.