单选题In 1956, when the cold war was at its peak, America deployed a "secret sonic weapon", as a newspaper headline put it at the time. That weapon was Dizzy Gillespie, a famed jazz musician, who was given the task of changing the world's view of American culture through rhythm and beat. Crowds poured into the street to dance. Cultural diplomacy died down after the cold war ended. But the attacks of September 11th 2001 convinced the State Department to send out America's musicians once again to woo hearts and minds with melody. Rhythm Road, a program run by the State Department and a non-profit organization, Jazz at Lincoln Centre, has made informal diplomats out of both musicians and audiences. Since it began in 2005, musicians have travelled to 96 countries. One band went to Mauritania, a country in northwestern Africa, after last year's coup; many depart for countries that have strained relationships with America. The musicians travel to places where some people have never seen an American. Jazz, so participants in the program, is well-suited to diplomacy. It is collaborative, allowing individuals both to harmonize and play solo—much like a democracy, says Ari Roland, who plays bass for a band that left New York to tour the Middle East on March 31st. Jazz is also a reminder of music's power. It helped break down racial barriers, as enthusiasts of all colors gathered to listen to jazz when segregation was still the law of the land. The State Department spent 10 million U.S. dollars on cultural diplomacy programs in the year to September 30th 2008. But most expect funding for the initiative to increase under Barack Obama, who pledged his support for cultural diplomacy during his campaign. Rhythm Road now sends out hip-hop and bluegrass bands as well. There are some dissenters. Nick Cull, the director of the Public Diplomacy Program at the University of Southern California, thinks that these diplomatic projects would be more productive if they were not administered by the same agency that oversees the country's foreign-policy agenda. And there is also clamor for Mr. Obama to appoint a secretary of culture in his cabinet. What good, they ask, is sending American culture abroad, when the country is not giving it proper attention at home?

单选题When Dr. John W.Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California and a leading nuclear critic, speaks of "ecocide" in his adversary view of nuclear technology, he means the following: A large nuclear plant like that in Kalkar, the Netherlands, would produce about 200 pounds of plutonium each year. One pound, released into the atmosphere, could cause 9 billion cases of lung cancer. This waste product must be stored for 500,000 years before it is of no further danger to man. In the anticipated reactor economy, it is estimated that there will be 10,000 tons of this material in Western Europe, of which one table-spoonful of plutonium-239 represents the official maximum permissible body burden for 200,000 people. Rather than being biodegradable, plutonium destroys biological properties. In 1972 the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration ruled that the asbestos level in the work place should be lowered to 2 fibers per cubic centimeter of air, but the effective date of the ruling has been delayed until now. The International Federation of Chemical and General Workers' Unions report that the 2-fiber standard was based primarily on one study of 290 men at a British asbestos factory. But when the workers at the British factory had been reexamined by another physician, 40--70 percent had X-ray evidence of lung abnormalities. According to present medical information at the factory in question, out of a total of 29 deaths thus far, seven were caused by lung cancer. An average European or American worker comes into contact with six million fibers a day. "We are now, in fact, finding cancer deaths within the family of the asbestos worker," states Dr. Irving Selikoff, of the Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. It is now also clear that vinyl chloride, a gas from which the most widely used plastics are made, causes a fatal cancer of the blood-vessel cells of the liver. However, the history of the research on vinyl chloride is, in some ways, more disturbing than the "Watergate cover-up." "There has been evidence of potentially serious disease among polyvinyl chloride workers for 25 years that has been incompletely appreciated and inadequately approached by medical scientists and by regulatory authorities," summed up Dr. Selikoff in the New Scientist. At least 17 workers have been killed by vinyl chloride because research over the past 25 years was not followed up. And for over 10 years, workers have been exposed to concentrations of vinyl chloride 10 times the "safe limit" imposed by Dow Chemical Company. (422 words)Notes: plutonium 钚。asbestos 石棉。polyvinyl chloride 聚氯乙烯。

单选题The story of J. B. S. Haldane is mentioned in the text ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Can this be the right time to invest in luxury goods? {{U}}Miuccia Prada was obviously biting her nails.{{/U}} The granddaughter of the founder of the Italian fashion group has just opened spectacular new stores in quick succession in New York and London. With its magic mirrors, silver displays and computer-controlled changing rooms, Prada's two-month-old shop in Manhattan cost a staggering $ 40m, sits just a mile from Ground Zero, and sells practically nothing. The luxury-goods business has been in despair in hasty succession against a background of a weakening global economy, an enduring slump in Japanese spending, and the September 11th terrorist attacks. The Japanese, who used to buy a third of the world's luxury goods, cut their foreign travel in half after the attacks and tightened their Louis Vuitton purse-strings. At the same time, wealthy Americans stopped flying, which has a dramatic effect on the luxury-goods purveyors of London, Paris and Rome. At home too, Americans' attitudes to luxury changed, at least temporarily. "Conspicuous abstention" replaced greedy consumerism among the fast-growing, younger breed of newly rich. The decline in job security, the lower bonuses in financial services, and the stock market bust that wiped out much of the paper wealth generated in the late 1990s, bred a new frugality. Sales of expensive jewelry, watches and handbags--the products that make the juiciest profits for the big luxury-goods groups--dropped sharply. The impact has been most striking among the handful of large, quoted luxury-goods companies. France's Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH), the industry leader, issued four profits warnings after September 11th and ended up reporting a 20% decline in operating profit for 2001, after having repeatedly promised its investors {{U}}double-digit growth{{/U}}; and Italy's Gucci Group, the third largest, announced this week that second-half profits dropped by 33%. Meanwhile, privately held Prada had to postpone its stock market flotation and was forced to sell a recently acquired stake in Fendi, a prestigious Italian bag maker, in order to reduce its debts. Luxury is an unusual business. A luxury brand cannot be extended indefinitely: if it becomes too common, it is devalued, as Pierre Cardin and Ralph Lauren proved by sticking their labels on everything from T-shirts to paint. Equally, a brand name can be undermined if it is not advertised consistently, or if it is displayed and sold poorly. Sagra Maceira de Rosen, a luxury-goods analyst at J. P. Morgan, argues that, "Luxury companies are primarily retailers. In retailing, the most important thing is execution, and execution is all about management. You may have the best designed product, but if you don't get it into the right kind of shop at the right time, you will fail."

单选题Contrary to the impression that grandmothers are delighted to help their grown daughters and care for their grandchildren, a study of multigenerational families indicates that many older women resent the frequent impositions of the younger generations on their home and energy. "Young women with children are under a lot of pressure these days, and they expect their mothers to help them pick up the pieces," noted Dr. Bertram J. Cohler, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago. "This is often the strongest source of resentment on the part of Grandmother, who has finished with child caring and now has her own life to live. Grandmothers like to see their children and grandchildren, but on their own time." In all the four New England families studied, the older women resented the numerous phone calls and visits from their grown daughter, who often turned to their mothers for advice, physical resources, affection, and companionship as well as baby sitting services. "American society keeps piling on the burdens for older people, particularly those in their 50s and 60s," Dr. Cohler said in an interview here. "They're still working and they're taking care of their grown children and maybe also their aged parents. Sometimes life gets to be too much. That's one reason many older folks move far away, to Florida or Arizona. They need more space and time to attend to their own affair and friends. Young people don't understand this, and that's part of what create tension between generations." He has found that, contrary to what the younger generations may have thought, older people have an enormous amount to do. "More than half of working-class grandmothers still work, and if they' re retired they have activities in the community that keep them occupied," he said. "Each generation has got to appreciate the unique needs of the other," Dr. Cohler went on. "The younger generation has to realize that grandparents have busy, active lives and that they need privacy and more space for themselves. And the older generation has to realize that continuing to be part of the family is important to the younger generation and that they need help and support." He noted that problems with interdependence between generations were likely to be more intense in working-class families than in middle and upper-class families. He explained that the working class tended to be geographically less mobile and to have fewer outside resources and that daughters were more likely to be reared with a strong family orientation and less emphasis on establishing an independent life.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} British cancer' researchers have found that childhood leukaemia is caused by an infection and clusters of cases around industrial sites are the result of population mixing that increases exposure. The research published in the British Journal of Cancer backs up a 1988 theory that some as yet unidentified infection caused leukaemia--not the environmental factors widely blamed for the disease. "Childhood leukaemia appears to be an unusual result of a common infection," said Sir Richard Doll, an internationally-known cancer expert who first linked tobacco with lung cancer in 1950. "A virus is the most likely explanation. You would get an increased risk of it if you Suddenly put a lot of people from large towns in a rural area, where you might have people who had not been exposed to the infection. " Doll was commenting on the new findings by researchers at Newcastle University, which focused on a cluster of leukaemia cases around the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria in northern England. Scientists have been trying to establish why there was more leukaemia in children around the Sellafield area, but have failed to establish a link with radiation or pollution. The Newcastle University research by Heather Dickinson and Louise Parker showed the cluster of cases could have been predicted because of the amount of population mixing going on in the area, as large numbers of construction workers and nuclear staff moved into a rural setting. "Our study shows that population mixing can account for the (Sellafield) leukaemia cluster and that all children, whether their parents are incomers or locals, are at a higher risk if they are born in an area of high population mixing," Dickinson said in a statement issued by the Cancer Research Campaign, which publishes the British Journal of Cancer. Their paper adds crucial weight to the 1988 theory put forward by Leo Kinlen, a cancer epidemiologist at Oxford University, who said that exposure to a common unidentified infection through population mixing resulted in the disease.

单选题Picture-taking is a technique both for reflecting the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer's temperament, discovering itself through the camera's cropping of reality. That is, photography has two directly opposite ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of fearlessness, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all. These conflicting ideals arise from uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture. Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as observer is attracting because it implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed. An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography's means. Whatever are the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression just like painting, its originality is closely linked to the power of a machine. The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton's high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke. But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limit imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident. For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing". Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast. This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past when images had a handmade quality. This longing for some primitive state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers. Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness. (451 words)Notes: crop vt.播种，修剪(树木),收割。count for little 无关紧要。predatory 掠夺成性的。champion n.冠军; vt.支持。benevolent 好心肠的，行善的。ambivalence 矛盾心理。make (+不定式)似乎要：He makes to begin. (他似乎要开始了。) swirls and eddies 漩涡。cult 狂热崇拜。daguerreotype 银板照相法。

单选题The author mentions the "social movement" (Last paragraph) generated by Chicago’s South Side community primarily in order to

单选题Faculties in Wesleyan have lower salaries mainly because the college

单选题The Bible is the great work of the religious literature and was in process of formation for about twelve hundred years. The Bible is composed of 1 , legend, biography, genealogies, ethics, law, proverbial wisdom, sermons, prophesy, lyric poetry, hymns and theology. It is not only 2 a book but a 3 of books. The Bible 4 two major 5 , the Old Testament and the New Testament . The Old Testament was written originally almost entirely 6 Hebrew with a little Aramaic, from the eleventh to the second century BC. It is the national 7 literature of the people of Israel. The New Testament was written in Greek from about 40 AD to 150. It 8 the earliest documents 8 the life, teaching, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the establishment of the 9 church. The 10 work is from the first book Genesis , to the last, Revelations. The 11 and richness of the Bible 12 literature 13 the Old Testament are unparalleled. In the literary 14 , poetry, The Bible is 16 . The Bible is an assemblage of literature. It is in a unique 15 among the world"s books 16 the richness of its 17 and spiritual values. It can be called the 18 of books.

单选题The writer thinks that the growth of specialist societies and periodicals has helped scholars to______.

单选题The word "retribution" (Line 7, Paragraph 3) most probably means

单选题By now, the 2012 Republican presidential contenders have all been tattooed by the opposition, branded as boring, damaged, or even insane. The entire GOP (共和党的别称) is "mad, " as The New Republic recently put it, and the party's White House hopefuls display what The New Yorker calls "crackles of craziness. " This kind of talk flows both ways, of course. But what if the big problem with Washington—isn't nuttiness so much as a lack of it? That's one takeaway from A First-Rate Madness, a new book of psychiatric case studies by Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center. He argues that what sets apart the world's great leaders isn't some splendidly healthy mind but an exceptionally broken one, coupled with the good luck to lead when extremity is needed. "Our greatest crisis leaders toil in sadness when society is happy, " writes Ghaemi. "Yet when calamity occurs, if they are in a position to act, they can lift up the rest of us. " If so, then what we need for these calamitous times is a calamitous mind, a madman in chief, someone whose abnormal brain can solve our abnormal problems. Perhaps the nicotione-free, no-drama Obama won't do after all. The good doctor isn't saying that all mental illness is a blessing. Only that the common diseases of the mind—mania, depression, and related quirks—shouldn't disqualify one from the upper stairs of public life, and for a simple reason: they are remarkably consistent predictors of brilliant success. Depression in all its forms (which Ghaemi finds in Abraham Lincoln and the mildly bipolar Churchill) brings suffering, which makes one more clear-eyed, fit to recognize the world's problems, and able to face them down like the noonday demon. Madness in all its forms ( which Ghaemi detects in FDR and JFK) brings resilience, which helps one learn from failure, often with enough creativity to make a new start. Most originally, Ghaemi coins "the inverse law of sanity" : the perils of well-being. It's why the poor, sane Neville Chamberlain chummed around with Nazi leaders while Churchill's "black dog" foresaw a fight. In Ghaemi's view, even our supposedly crazy leaders were too sane for their times, and the nation suffered. When Richard Nixon faced the Watergate crisis, "he handled it the way an average normal person would handle it: he lied, and he dug in, and he fought. " Similarly, George W. Bush was " middle of the road in his personality traits, " which is why his response to the September 11 attacks was simplistic, unwavering, and, above all, "normal. " So should we bring on the crazy in 2012? At the very least, we should rethink our definitions and stop assuming that normality is always good, and abnormality always bad. If Ghaemi is right, that is far too simplistic and stigmatizing, akin to excluding people by race or religion—only possibly worse because excellence can clearly spring from the unwell, and mediocrity from the healthy. The challenge is getting voters to think this way, too. It won't do to have candidates shaking Prozac bottles (一种治疗抑郁症的物) from the podium, unless the public is ready to reward them for it. Amid multiple wars and lingering recession, maybe that time is now.