单选题In a provocative new book The Beauty Bias, Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor who proposes a legal regime in which discrimination on the basis of looks is as serious as discrimination based on gender or race, lays out the case for an America in which appearance discrimination is no longer allowed. Rhode is at her most persuasive when arguing that in America, discrimination against unattractive women and short men is as pernicious and widespread as bias based on race, sex, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability. Rhode cites research to prove her point: 11 percent of surveyed couples say they would abort a fetus predisposed toward obesity. College students tell surveyors they'd rather have a spouse who is an embezzler, drug user, or a shoplifter than one who is obese. The less attractive you are in America, the more likely you are to receive a longer prison sentence, a lower damage award, a lower salary, and poorer performance reviews. You are less likely to be married and more likely to be poor. And all of this is compounded by a virtually unregulated beauty and diet industry and soaring rates of elective cosmetic surgery. Rhode reminds us how Hillary Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor were savaged by the media for their looks, and says it's no surprise that Sarah Palin paid her makeup artist more than any member of her staff in her run for the vice presidency. Critics such as Andrew Sullivan claim that if we legally ban appearance discrimination, the next step will be legal protection of "the short, the skinny, the bald, the knobbly kneed, the flat-chested and the stupid. " But Rhode points out that there are already laws against appearance discrimination on the books in Michigan and six other locales. This hasn't resulted in an explosion of frivolous suits, she notes. In each jurisdiction the new laws have generated between zero and nine cases annually. Of course the problem with making appearance discrimination illegal is that Americans just really, really like hot girls. And so long as being a hot girl is deemed a bona fide occupational qualification, there will be cocktail waitresses fired for gaining three pounds. It's not just American men who like things this way. In the most troubling chapter in her book, Rhode explores the feminist movement's complicated relationship to eternal youth. The truth is that women feel good about competing in beauty pageants. They love six-inch heels. They feel beautiful after cosmetic surgery. You can't succeed in public life if you look old in America. This doesn't mean we shouldn't work toward eradicating discrimination based on appearance. But it may mean recognizing that the law won't stop us from discriminating against the overweight, the aging, and the imperfect, so long as it's the quality we all hate most in ourselves.

单选题Now that many media chieftains have fallen into disrepute and have left, those who are still in positions feel the need to take the problem seriously. "CEOs were overturned as were some stocks." That is how AOL Time Warner entertainment group Chairman Jeff Bewkes summed it up. The era of the "imperial" (one-man rule) CEO has come to an end, MTV Networks Chairman Tom Freston added. The two executives agreed that the industry's complex and often ill-fated megs mergers had proven that bigger is not necessarily better, no matter how big the reputations of the personalities behind them. The continuing flameout of media executives who a few years ago were hailed as visionaries was active this month, and the industry's fears reached into the executive ranks of music, publishing and TV. Technology visionary Steve Case left as chairman of AOL Time Warner, replaced by Chief Executive Richard Parsons. Top executives at Sony Music, MCA Records and Random House were booted. And Walter Isaacson, chairman of CNN Networks, left for a think tank. This shows just how difficult it has become to find the right managers for the terribly altered media. "Many executives got caught up in the late 90's boom in the media industry and got ahead of themselves in strategic vision for their companies," said Mark May, of US investment firm Kaufman Bros. "It takes more than a couple of years for these companies to be ready for another visionary. " The collapse of the dotcom bubble, the ability of music fans to get songs free on the Internet, sagging bottom lines and intense competition among cable TV news networks are some developments that helped trip up media executives recently. But the urge to merge was one of their weakest points. It is not that media companies should avoid all mergers, said Larry Haverty, managing director at State Street Research, a US investment management firm. They need acquisitions for growth. But making them work is a real challenge. They need to choose what pieces fit together and how much they are worth. They need to adjust quickly when technology and consumer habit trends shift. And, more than ever, they must be careful not to promise too much. Sony Corp. of America Chairman Howard Stringer said that an executive today is "the rarest of senior entertainment executives, equally adept at business, management strategy and value creation, as well as a consummate (完美的) and proven developer of content, talent and ideas".

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 newspaper must provide for the reader the facts, unalloyed, unslanted (不歪曲的), objectively selected facts. But in the days of complex news it must provide more; it must supply interpretation, the meaning of the facts. This is the most important assignment confronting American journalism—to make clear to the reader the problems of the day, to make international news as understandable as community news, to recognize that the there is no longer any such thing as "local" news, bemuse any event in the international area has a local reaction in manpower draft, in economic strain, in terms, indeed, of our very Way of life. There is in journalism a widespread view that when you embark on interpretation, you are entering dangerous waters, the swirling tides of opinion. This is nonsense. The opponents of interpretation insist that the writer and the editor shall confine himself to the "facts". This insistence raises two questions: What are the facts? And: Are the bare facts enough? As to the first query. Consider how a so-called "factual" story comes about. The reporter collects, say, fifty facts; out of these fifty, his space allotment being necessarily restricted, he selects the ten which he considers most important. This is Judgment Number One. Then he or his editor decides which of these ten facts shall constitute the lead of the piece. (This is an important decision bemuse many readers do not proceed beyond the first paragraph.) This is Judgments Number Two. Then the night editor determines whether the article shall be presented on page one, where it has larger impact, or on page twenty-four, where it has little, Judgment Number Three. Thus, in the presentation of a so-called "factual" or "objective" story, at least three judgments are involved. And they are judgments not at all unlike those involved in interpretation, in which reporter and editor, calling upon their research resources, their general background, and their "news neutralism" arrive at a conclusion as to the significance of the news. The two areas of judgment, presentation of the news and its interpretation, are both objective rather than subjective processes—as objective, that is, as any human being can be. (Note in passing: even though complete objectivity can never be achieved, nevertheless the ideal must always be the beacon on the murky news channels.) if an editor is intent on slanting the news. he can do it in other ways and more effectively than by interpretation. He can do it by the selection of those facts that prop up(支持)his particular plea. Or he can do it by the play when he gives a story promoting it to page one or demoting it to page thirty.

单选题Some geneticists don't accept the IGF2R gene-study because

单选题What does the word "they" (Para. 3, Line 2) refer to?

单选题When young people who want to be journalists ask me what subject they should study after leaving school, I tell them: "Anything except journalism or media studies." Most veterans of my trade would say the same. It is practical advice. For obvious reasons, newspaper editors like to employ people who can bring something other than a knowledge of the media to the party that we call our work. On The Daily Telegraph, for example, the editor of London Spy is a theologian by academic training. The obituaries editor is a philosopher. The editor of our student magazine, Juice, studied physics. As for myself, I read history, ancient and modern, at the taxpayer's expense. I am not sure what Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, would make of all this. If I understand him correctly, he would think that the public money spent on teaching this huge range of disciplines to the staff of The Daily Telegraph was pretty much wasted. The only academic course of which he would wholeheartedly approve in the list above would be physics -but then again, he would probably think it a terrible waste that Simon Hogg chose to edit Juice instead of designing aeroplanes or building nuclear reactors. By that, he seems to mean that everything taught at the public expense should have a direct, practical application that will benefit society and the economy. It is extremely alarming that the man in charge of Britain's education system should think in this narrow-minded, half-witted way. The truth, of course, is that all academic disciplines benefit society and the economy, whether in a direct and obvious way or not. They teach students to think--to process information and to distinguish between what is important and unimportant, true and untrue. Above all, a country in which academic research and intelligent ideas are allowed to flourish is clearly a much more interesting, stimulating and enjoyable place than one without "ornaments", in which money and usefulness are all that count. Mr. Clarke certainly has a point when he says that much of what is taught in Britain's universities is useless. But it is useless for a far more serious reason than that it lacks any obvious economic utility. As the extraordinarily high drop-out rate testifies, it is useless because it fails the first test of university teaching---that it should stimulate the interest of those being taught. When students themselves think that their courses are a waste of time and money, then a waste they are. The answer is not to cut off state funding for the humanities. It is to offer short, no nonsense vocational courses to those who want to learn a trade, and reserve university places for those who want to pursue an academic discipline. By this means, a great deal of wasted money could be saved and all students the academic and the no, so-academic--would benefit. What Mr. Clarke Seems to be proposing instead is an act of cultural vandalism that would rob Britain of all claim to be called a civilised country.

单选题Tuning in round the clock, via satellite or internet blog, to any bout of mayhem anywhere, you might not think the world was becoming a more peaceable place. But in some ways it is, and measurably so. A recent Human Security Report released by the Liu Institute at the University of British Columbia registers a 40% drop in the number of armed conflicts between 1992 and 2003, with the worst wars, those claiming more than a thousand lives in battle, down by 80%. While 28 armed struggles for self-determination ignited or reignited between 1991 and 2004, an encouraging 43 others were contained or doused. Yet measured in a different way, from the point of view of the half of the world's population that is female, argues the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces, the world is an awfully violent place, and not just in its war zones. Men still fill most of the bodybags in wartime, including in civil wars, even on DCAF's figures, but their sisters, mothers, wives and daughters, it argues in a new report entitled "Women in an Insecure World", face nothing short of a "hidden gendercide". Violence against women is nothing new. DCAF's contribution is to collate the many figures and estimates--not all of them easily verifiable, it has to be said—on everything from infanticide to rape (in both war and peace), dowry deaths, sex trafficking and domestic violence (in richer countries as well as poorer ones). According to one UN estimate cited by DCAF, between 113m and 200m women are now demographically "missing". This gender gap is a result of the aborting of girl foetuses and infanticide in countries where boys are preferred; lack of food and medical attention that goes instead to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons, so-called "honour killings" and dowry deaths; and other sorts of domestic violence. It implies that each year between 1.5m and 3m women and girls are lost to gender based violence. In other words, every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler's Holocaust. Women between the ages of 15 and 44 are more likely to be maimed or die from violence inflicted one way or another by their menfolk than through cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war combined. Poor health care means that 600 000 women are lost each year to childbirth (a toll roughly equal annually to that of the Rwandan genocide). The World Health Organisation estimates that 6 000 girls a day (more than 2m a year), mostly in the poor world, undergo genital mutilation. Other WHO figures suggest that, around the world, one woman in five is likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

单选题{{B}}Section Ⅱ Reading Comprehension{{/B}}{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} {{I}}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.{{/I}}{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} People in business can use foresight to identify new products and services, as well as markets for those products and services. An increase in minority populations in a neighborhood would prompt a grocer with foresight to stock more foods linked to ethnic tastes. An art museum director with foresight might follow trends in computer graphics to make exhibits more appealing to younger visitors. Foresight may reveal potential threats that we can prepare to deal with before they become crises. For instance, a corporate manager with foresight might see an alarming rise in local housing prices that could affect the availability of skilled workers in the region. The public's changing values and priorities, as well as emerging technologies, demographic shifts, economic constraints (or opportunities), and environmental and resource concerns are all parts of the increasingly complex world system in which leaders must lead. People in government also need foresight to keep systems running smoothly, to plan budgets, and to prevent wars. Government leaders today must deal with a host of new problems emerging from rapid advances in technology. Even at the community level, foresight is critical: School officials, for example, need foresight to assess numbers of students to accommodate, numbers of teachers to hire, new educational technologies to deploy, and new skills for students (and their teachers) to develop. Many of the best-known techniques for foresight were developed by government planners, especially in the military, when the post-World War II atomic age made it critical to "think about the unthinkable" and prepare for it. Pioneering futurists at the RAND Corporation (the first "think tank ") began seriously considering what new technologies might emerge in the future and how these might affect U. S. security. These pioneering futurists at RAND, along with others elsewhere, refined a variety of new ways for thinking about the future. The futurists recognized that the future world is continuous with the present world, so we can learn a great deal about what may happen in the future by looking systematically at what is happening now. The key thing to watch is not events ( sudden developments or one-day occurrences) but trends (long-term ongoing shifts in such things as population, land use, technology, and governmental systems) . Using these techniques and many others, futurists now can tell us many things that may happen in the future. Some are nearly certain to happen, such as the continuing expansion in the world's population. Other events are viewed as far less likely, but could be extremely important if they do occur, such as an asteroid colliding with the planet.

单选题The uniqueness of the Japanese character is the result of two seemingly contradictory forces: the strength of traditions, and the selective receptivity to foreign achievements and inventions. As early as 1860s there were counter movement to traditional orientation. One of the famous spokesmen of Japan's "Enlightenment" claimed "the Confucian civilization of the East seems to me to lack two things possessed by Western civilization: science in the material sphere and a sense of independence in the spiritual sphere." Another break of relative liberalism followed World War Ⅰ, when the democratic idealism of President Woodrow Wilson had an important impact on Japanese intellectuals and, especially, students; but more important was the Leninist ideology of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Again, in the early 1930s, nationalism and militarism became dominant. Following the end of World War Ⅱ, substantial changes were undertaken in Japan to liberate the individual from authoritarian restraints. The new democratic value system was accepted by many teachers, students, intellectuals, and old liberals, but it was not immediately embraced by the society as a whole. Japanese traditions were dominated by group values, and notions of personal freedom and individual rights were unfamiliar. Today, democratic processes are clearly evident in the widespread participation of the Japanese people in social and political life. School textbooks emphasize equality over hierarchy and rationalism over tradition; hut in practice these values are often misinterpreted and distorted, particularly by the youth who translate the individualistic and humanistic goals of democracy into egoistic and materialistic ones. Most Japanese people have consciously rejected Confucianism, but leftovers of the old order remain. An important feature of relationship in many institutions, including political parties and universities is the "oyabun-kobun" or parent-child relation. The corresponding loyalty of the individual to his patron reinforces his allegiance to the group to which they both belong. A willingness to cooperate with other members of the group and to support without qualification the interests of the group in all its external relations is still a widely respected virtue. The "oyabun-kohun" creates ladders of mobility which an individual can ascend, rising as far as abilities permit, so long as he maintains successful personal ties with a superior in the vertical channel, the latter requirement usually taking precedence over a need for exceptional competence. As a consequence, there is little horizontal relationship between people even with the same profession.

单选题I don't know why UFOs are never sighted over large cities by hordes of people. But it is consistent with the idea that there are no space vehicles from elsewhere in our skies. I suppose it is also consistent with the ideas that space vehicles from elsewhere avoid large cities. However, the primary argument against recent extraterrestrial visitation is the absence of evidence. Take leprechauns. Suppose there are frequent reports of leprechauns. Because I myself am emotionally predisposed in favor of leprechauns, I would want to check the evidence especially carefully. Suppose I find that 500 picnickers independently saw a green blur in the forest. Terrific. But so what? This is evidence only for a green blur. Maybe it was a fast hummingbird. Such cases are reliable but not particularly interesting. Now suppose that someone reports: "I was walking through the forest and came upon a convention of 7000 leprechauns. We talked for a while and I was taken down into their hole in the ground and shown pots of gold and feathered green hats. "I will reply: "Fabulous! Who else went along?" And he will say, "Nobody," or "My fishing partner. "This is a case that is interesting but unreliable. In a case of such importance, the uncorroborated testimony of one or two people is almost worthless. What I want is for the 500 picnickers to come upon the 7000 leprechauns.., or vice versa. The situation is the same with UFOs. The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable. Unfortunately, there are no cases that are both reliable and interesting.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} New graduates in America are used to facing an uncertain future while saddled with heavy debts. Now Sallie Mae, the firm that provides many of them with the financial wherewithal to complete their education, will understand how they feel. On Monday April 16th it was announced that two private-equity firms along with two banks, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, had agreed to pay $25 billion for America's leading student-loan provider. In the past decade the market for student loans has doubled to around $85 billion a year. Student numbers have swelled while incomes have failed to keep pace with the soaring cost of college education. Sallie Mae has over a quarter of the entire business in America. And though margins are wafer-thin the firm made a profit of $1.2 billion last year. This profitability has attracted the interest of both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, seeking ways to save money while making education more affordable. Particularly vulnerable is the proportion doled out to big and profitable private companies like Sallie Mae to subsidise affordable government-backed loans. These now account for around 85% of its lending. Sallie Mae's profits and healthy cash-flow are a draw for private equity. And the involvement of the two banks could prove useful for plugging any gap in financing, if the firm's credit rating slips following the assumption of so much debt. It helps that Sallie Mae is also making money beyond its core business. The market for private loans, without government subsidies or guarantees, is growing fast as the cost of education grows while the size of federal loans that students can take out has remained flat. This sort of loan is nicely profitable because lenders can levy high interest rates. New graduates are also targets: Sallie Mae has built a big debt-collection arm for reluctant repayers and a college-fund business for fast breeders. Even the renewed interest from politicians could play into Sallie Mae's hands. The lure of profits over the past decade has drawn more lenders into the business. Any future regulations or legislation that might shave profit margins further could deter new entrants or force smaller lenders out of the business, and Sallie Mae may get more opportunities to offset the reduction. But despite all the safeguards, students are high risk borrowers who quickly amass big debts. Sallie Mae, like many of the students it serves, could wake up one day with a nasty hangover (拖欠) and little recollection about how it came about.

单选题The issue of online privacy in the Internet age found new urgency following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sparking debate over striking the correct balance between protecting civil liberties and attempting to prevent another tragic terrorist act. While preventing terrorism certainly is of paramount importance, privacy rights should not be deemed irrelevant. In response to the attacks, Congress quickly passed legislation that included provisions expanding rights of investigators to intercept wire, oral and electronic communications of alleged hackers and terrorists. Civil liberties groups expressed concerns over the provisions and urged caution in ensuring that efforts to protect our nation do not result in broad government authority to erode privacy rights of U. S. citizens. Nevertheless, causing further concern to civil liberties groups, the Department of Justice proposed exceptions to the attorney-client privilege. On Oct. 30, Attorney General John Ashcroft approved an interim agency rule that would permit federal prison authorities to monitor wire and electronic communications between lawyers and their clients in federal custody, including those who have been detained but not charged with any crime, whenever surveillance is deemed necessary to prevent violence or terrorism. In light of this broadening effort to reach into communications that were previously believed to be "off-limits", the issue of online privacy is now an even more pressing concern. Congress has taken some legislative steps toward ensuring online privacy, including the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and provided privacy protections for certain sectors through legislation such as the Financial Services Modernization Act. The legislation passed to date does not, however, provide a statutory scheme for protecting general online consumer privacy. Lacking definitive federal law, some states passed their own measures. But much of this legislation is incomplete or not enforced. Moreover, it becomes unworkable when states create different privacy standards; the Internet does not know geographic boundaries, and companies and individuals cannot be expected to comply with differing, and at times conflicting, privacy rules. An analysis earlier this year of 751 U. S. and international Web sites conducted by Consumers International found that most sites collect personal information but fail to tell consumers how that data will be used, how security is maintained and what rights consumers have over their own information. At a minimum, Congress should pass legislation requiring Web sites to display privacy policies prominently, inform consumers of the methods employed to collect client data, allow customers to opt out Of such data collection, and provide customer access to their own data that has already been collected. Although various Internet privacy bills were introduced in the 107th Congress, the focus shifted to expanding government surveillance in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Plainly, government efforts to prevent terrorism are appropriate. Exactly how these exigent circumstances change the nature of the online privacy debate is still to be seen.

单选题Jeans were not popular in some countries for ______ reasons.

单选题It can be inferred from physical phenomenon ______.

单选题The phrase "Taliban-style thinking" (Line 1, Paragraph 8) most probably refers to