单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Every second, 1 hectare of the world's rainforest is destroyed. That's equivalent to two football fields. An area the size of New York City is lost every day. In a year, that adds up to 31 million hectares—more than the land area of Poland. This alarming rate of destruction has serious consequences for the environment; scientists estimate, for example, that 137 species of plant, insect or animal become extinct every day due to logging. In British Columbia, where, since 1990, thirteen rainforest valleys have been clearcut, 142 species of salmon have already become extinct, and the habitats of grizzly bears, wolves and many other creatures are threatened. Logging, however, provides jobs, profits, taxes for the government and cheap products of all kinds for consumers, so the government is reluctant to restrict or control it. Much of Canada's forestry production goes towards making pulp and paper. According to the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, Canada supplies 34% of the world's wood pulp and 49% of its newsprint paper. If these paper products could be produced in some other way, Canadian forests could be preserved. Recently, a possible alternative way of producing paper has been suggested by agriculturalists and environmentalists: a plant called hemp. Hemp has been cultivated by many cultures for thousands of years. It produces fiber which can be made into paper, fuel, oils, textiles, food, and rope. For many centuries, it was essential to the economies of many countries because it was used to make the ropes and cables used on sailing ships; colonial expansion and the establishment of a world wide trading network would not have been possible without hemp. Nowadays, ships' cables are usually made from wire or synthetic fibres, but scientists are now suggesting that the cultivation of hemp should be revived for the production of paper and pulp. According to its proponents, four times as much paper can be produced from land using hemp rather than trees, and many environmentalists believe that the large-scale cultivation of hemp could reduce the pressure on Canada's forests. However, there is a problem: hemp is illegal in many countries of the world. This plant, so useful for fiber, rope, oil, fuel and textiles, is a species of cannabis, related to the plant from which marijuana is produced. In the late 1930s, a movement to ban the drug marijuana began to gather force, resulting in the eventual banning of the cultivation not only of the plant used to produce the drug, but also of the commercial fiber-producing hemp plant. Although both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp in large quantities on their own land, any American growing the plant today would soon find himself in prison—despite the fact that marijuana cannot be produced from the hemp plant, since it contains almost no THC (the active ingredient in the drug). In recent years, two major movements for legalization have been gathering strength. One group of activists believes that ALL cannabis should be legal—both the hemp plant and the marijuana plant—and that the use of the drug marijuana should not be an offense. They argue that marijuana is not dangerous or addictive, and that it is used by large numbers of people who are not criminals but productive members of society. They also point out that marijuana is less toxic than alcohol or tobacco. The other legalization movement is concerned only with the hemp plant used to produce fiber; this group wants to make it legal to cultivate the plant and sell the fiber for paper and pulp production. This second group has had a major triumph recently: in 1997, Canada legalized the farming of hemp for fiber. For the first time since 1938, hundreds of farmers are planting this crop, and soon we can expect to see pulp and paper produced from this new source.

单选题The sentence "But we pay for our sensitivity."in the third paragraph implies that______.

单选题"Worse than useless," fumed Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman from California, on March 19th, when the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Terrible, and getting worse," added Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic colleague who has kept a watchful eye on the INS for ten years. Committee members lined up to take swings at James Ziglar, the head of the INS. He explained, somewhat pathetically, that "outdated procedures" had kept the visa-processing wheels grinding slowly through a backlog of applications. He also had some new rules in mind to tighten up visas. Speeding up the paperwork--and getting more of it on to computers--is vital, but the September attacks have exposed the tension between the agency's two jobs: on the one hand enforcing the security of America's borders, and on the other granting privileges such as work permits to foreigners. But other people want more radical changes. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, wants to split the INS into two separate bodies, one dealing with border security and the other with handling benefits to immigrants. The other approach, favored in the White House, is to treat the two functions as complementary, and to give the INS even more responsibility for security. Under that plan, the INS would merge with the Customs Service, which monitors the 20m shipments of goods brought into America every year, as well as the bags carried in by some 500m visitors. The two agencies would form one large body within the Department of Justice, the current home of the INS. This would cut out some of the duplicated effort at borders, where customs officers and agents from the INS's Border Patrol often rub shoulders but do not work together. Mr Bush--who has said that the news of the visa approvals left him "plenty hot" --was expected to give his approval. The senate, however, may not be quite so keen. The Justice Department could have trouble handling such a merger, let alone taking on the considerable economic responsibilities of the Customs Service, which is currently part of the Treasury. The senate prefers yet another set of security recommendations, including links between the databases of different agencies that hold security and immigration information, and scanners at ports of entry to check biometric data recorded on immigration documents. These ideas are embodied in a bill sponsored by members of both parties, but are currently held up by Robert Byrd, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who worries that there has not been enough debate on the subject. Mr Ziglar, poor chap, may feel there Nas been more than enough.

单选题According to the text, which of the following is true of English migrants to the colonies during the 18th century?

单选题Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank. Women often{{U}} (1) {{/U}}that dating is like a cattle{{U}} (2) {{/U}}, and a paper just published in Biology Letters by Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, in England, suggests they are{{U}} (3) {{/U}}. They have little cause for complaint, however, because the paper also suggests that in this particular market, it is{{U}} (4) {{/U}}who are the buyers. Mr. Pollet and Dr. Nettle were looking for{{U}} (5) {{/U}}to support the contention that women choose men of{{U}} (6) {{/U}}status and resources, as well as good looks. That may sound common sense, but it was often{{U}} (7) {{/U}}by social scientists until a group of researchers who called themselves evolutionary psychologists started investigating the matter two decades ago. Since then, a series of experiments in laboratories have supported the contention. But as all zoologists know, {{U}}(8) {{/U}}can only tell you so much. Eventually, you have to look at{{U}} (9) {{/U}} populations. And that is what Mr. Pollet and Dr. Nettle have done. They have examined data from the 19t0 census of the United States of America and discovered that marriage is, indeed, a market. Moreover, as in any market, a{{U}} (10) {{/U}}of buyers means the sellers have to have particularly attractive goods on{{U}} (11) {{/U}}if they are to make the exchange. The advantage of picking 1910 was that America had not yet settled down, demographically speaking. Though the long-colonized eastern states had a sex{{U}} (12) {{/U}}of one man to one woman, or thereabouts, in the rest of the country the old adage "go west, young man" had resulted in a{{U}} (13) {{/U}}of males. Mr. Pollet and Dr Nettle were thus able to see just how picky women are, {{U}}(14) {{/U}}the chance. {{U}} (15) {{/U}}looking at the whole census, the two researchers relied on a sample of one person in 250. They then{{U}} (16) {{/U}}the men in the sample a socioeconomic status score between zero and 96, on a scale drawn up in 1950 (which was as close to 1910 as they could get). They showed that in states where the sexes were equal in number, 56% of low status men were married by the age of 30, {{U}}(17) {{/U}}60% of high status men were. Even in this case, then, there are women who would prefer to remain{{U}} (18) {{/U}}rather than marry a deadbeat. When there were 110 men for every 100 women (as, for example, in Arizona), the women got really{{U}} (19) {{/U}}. In that case only 24% of low-status men were married by 30 compared with 46% of high-status men. As the men went west, then, so did their{{U}} (20) {{/U}}opportunities.

单选题During the past 15 years, the most important component of executive pay packages, and the one .most responsible for the large increase in the level of such compensation, has been stock-option grants. The increased use of option grants was justified as a way to align executives' interests with shareholders'. For various tax, accounting, and regulatory reasons, stock-option grants have largely comprised "at-the-money options": rights to purchase shares at an "exercise price" equal to the company's stock price on the grant date. In such at-the-money options, the selection of the grant date for awarding options determines the options' exercise price and thus can have a significant effect on their value. Earlier research by financial economists on backdating practices focused on the extent to which the company's stock price went up abnormally after the grant date, My colleagues and I focused instead on how a grant-date's price ranked in the distribution of stock prices during the month of the grant. Studying the universe of about 19,000 at-the-money, unscheduled grants awarded to public companies' CEOs during the decade 1996-2005, we found a clear relation between the likelihood of a day's being selected as a grant date for awarding options, and the rank of the day's stock price within the price distribution of the month: a day was most likely to be chosen if the stock price was at the lowest level of the month, second most likely to be chosen if the price was at the second-lowest level, and so forth. There is an especially large incidence of "lucky grants" (defined as grants awarded on days on which the stock price was at the lowest level of the month): 12 percent of all CEO option grants were lucky grants, while only 4 percent were awarded at the highest price of the month. The passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in August 2002 required firms to report grants within two days of any award. Most firms complied with this requirement, but more than 20 percent of grants continued to be reported after a long delay. Thus, the legislation could be expected to reduce but not eliminate backdating. The patterns of CEO luck are consistent with this expectation: the percentage of grants that were lucky was a high 15 percent before enactment of the law, and declined to a lower, but still abnormally high, level of 8 percent afterwards. Altogether, we estimate that about 1,150 CEO stock-option grants owed their financially advantageous status to opportunistic timing rather than to mere luck. This practice was spread over a significant number of CEOs and firms: we estimate that about 850 CEOs ( about 10 percent) and about 720 firms ( about 12 percent) received or provided such lucky grants. In addition, we estimate that about 550 additional grants at the second-lowest or third-lowest price of the month owed their status to opportunistic timing. The cases that have come under scrutiny thus far have led to a widespread impression that opportunistic timing has been primarily concentrated in "new economy" firms. But while the frequency of lucky grants has been somewhat higher in such firms, more than 80 percent of the opportunistically timed grants have been awarded in other sectors. Indeed, there is a significantly higher-than-normal incidence of lucky grants in each of the economy's 12 industries.

单选题The teenagers are clustered around lunch tables, wolfing down heaps of beans on toast or pasta with a spicy eggplant sauce, buttering their bread, peeling oranges. These kids are refueling. It is midway through week five of a six-week sports camp, and they have spent the morning running and doing basketball drills. That—along with the fact that they are, after all, teenagers—means they are hungry. Based at Leeds Metropolitan University, the Carnegie International Camp is Britain's first summer weight-loss program for children, and their counselors know exactly how many calories are on those lunch plates. Some 40 boys and girls, 11 to 17, pay $550 a week to be put on monitored meal plans, attend nutrition classes, have their body fat measured and, every day, exercise until they are ready to drop—or at least feign knee injuries. All of these kids had to be around 35% above the World Health Organization's mean recommended weight to be accepted and chose to spend their summer vacations this way. It is nice, some of the campers say, to be someplace where they are not outcasts: where some of them, for the first time ever, can make friends, go on dates, and get special attention in sports classes, rather than get chosen last. By summer's end the weight losses were not dramatic. Most campers shed around 2 kg a week. That slow, steady loss, rather than some dramatic disappearance of pounds that will reappear by Christmas, is exactly what Paul Gately, the camp's founder and a lecturer in exercise physiology and health at the university, intended. "The main aim is to encourage them to be active and competent at sports, and then they'll get confident," he says. "And if you get them early you can prevent diseases later in life." In our weight-obsessed society, it is sometimes easy to forget that more than a cosmetic issue fat is also a pressing health concern. Gately is a member a small European community of health and medical professionals who are focusing on one of the regions, most serious and most misunderstood health problems: obesity. Obesity is defined by WHO as a body mass index (BMI)—one's weight in kilograms divided by the square of one's height in meters—equal to or greater than 30. A person 1.78rn tall and tipping the scales at 125 kg, for example, would have a BMI of 39.5, definitely obese. It is a risk factor for a wide range of serious medical conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain forms of cancer, gall bladder disease and joint problems.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The first technological revolution in modern biology started when James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of DNA half a century ago. That established the fields of molecular and cell biology, the basis of the biotechnology industry. The sequencing of the human genome nearly a decade ago set off a second revolution which has started to illuminate the origins of diseases. Now the industry is convinced that a third revolution is under way: the convergence of biology and engineering. A recent report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that physical sciences have already been transformed by their adoption of information technology, advanced materials, imaging, nanotechnolugy and sophisticated modelling and simulation. Phillip Sharp, a Nobel prize-winner at that university, believes that those tools are about to be brought to bear on biology too. But the chances are that this will take time, and turn out to be more of a reformation than a revolution. The conventional health-care systems of the rich world may resist new technologies even as poor countries leapfrog ahead. There is already a backlash against genomics, which has been oversold to consumers as a deterministic science. And given soaring health-care costs, insurers and health systems may not want to adopt new technologies unless inventors can show conclusively that they will produce better outcomes and offer value for money. If these obstacles can be overcome, then the biggest winner will be the patient. In the past medicine has taken a paternalistic stance, with the all-knowing physician dispensing wisdom from on high, but that is becoming increasingly untenable. Digitisation promises to connect doctors not only to everything they need to know about their patients but also to other doctors who have treated similar disorders. That essential reform will enable many other big technological changes to be introduced. Just as important, it can make that information available to the patients too, empowering them to play a bigger part in managing their own health affairs. This is controversial, and with good reason. Many doctors, and some patients, reckon they lack the knowledge to make informed decisions. But patients actually know a great deal about many diseases, especially chronic ones like diabetes and heart problems with which they often live for many years. The best way to deal with those is for individuals to take more responsibility for their own health and prevent problems before they require costly hospital visits. That means putting electronic health records directly into patients’ hands.

单选题During the past 15 years, the most important component of executive pay packages, and the one .most responsible for the large increase in the level of such compensation, has been stock-option grants. The increased use of option grants was justified as a way to align executives' interests with shareholders'. For various tax, accounting, and regulatory reasons, stock-option grants have largely comprised "at-the-money options": rights to purchase shares at an "exercise price" equal to the company's stock price on the grant date. In such at-the-money options, the selection of the grant date for awarding options determines the options' exercise price and thus can have a significant effect on their value. Earlier research by financial economists on backdating practices focused on the extent to which the company's stock price went up abnormally after the grant date, My colleagues and I focused instead on how a grant-date's price ranked in the distribution of stock prices during the month of the grant. Studying the universe of about 19,000 at-the-money, unscheduled grants awarded to public companies' CEOs during the decade 1996-2005, we found a clear relation between the likelihood of a day's being selected as a grant date for awarding options, and the rank of the day's stock price within the price distribution of the month: a day was most likely to be chosen if the stock price was at the lowest level of the month, second most likely to be chosen if the price was at the second-lowest level, and so forth. There is an especially large incidence of "lucky grants" (defined as grants awarded on days on which the stock price was at the lowest level of the month): 12 percent of all CEO option grants were lucky grants, while only 4 percent were awarded at the highest price of the month. The passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in August 2002 required firms to report grants within two days of any award. Most firms complied with this requirement, but more than 20 percent of grants continued to be reported after a long delay. Thus, the legislation could be expected to reduce but not eliminate backdating. The patterns of CEO luck are consistent with this expectation: the percentage of grants that were lucky was a high 15 percent before enactment of the law, and declined to a lower, but still abnormally high, level of 8 percent afterwards. Altogether, we estimate that about 1,150 CEO stock-option grants owed their financially advantageous status to opportunistic timing rather than to mere luck. This practice was spread over a significant number of CEOs and firms: we estimate that about 850 CEOs ( about 10 percent) and about 720 firms ( about 12 percent) received or provided such lucky grants. In addition, we estimate that about 550 additional grants at the second-lowest or third-lowest price of the month owed their status to opportunistic timing. The cases that have come under scrutiny thus far have led to a widespread impression that opportunistic timing has been primarily concentrated in "new economy" firms. But while the frequency of lucky grants has been somewhat higher in such firms, more than 80 percent of the opportunistically timed grants have been awarded in other sectors. Indeed, there is a significantly higher-than-normal incidence of lucky grants in each of the economy's 12 industries.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Until recently, the common factor in all the science used to figure out if a piece of art was forged was that it was concerned with the medium of the artwork, rather than the art itself. Matters of style and form were left to art historians, who could make erudite,, but qualitative, judgments about whether a painting was really good enough to be, say, a Leonardo. But this is changing. A paper in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Hany Farid and his colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire uses statistical techniques to examine art itself--the message, not the medium. Dr. Farid employed a technique called wavelet analysis to examine 13 drawings that had at one time or another been attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a 16th-century Flemish painter. He also looked at Perugino's "Madonna with Child", a 15th-century Italian - masterpiece lodged in the college's Hood Museum of Art. He concluded, in agreement with art historians, that eight of the putative Bruegels are authentic, while the other five are imitations. In the case of "Madonna with Child", he analysed the six faces in the painting (Mary, the infant Jesus and several saints) and found that three of them were probably done by the same painter, while the other three were each done by a different hand. The view that four different painters worked on the canvas is, he says, consistent with the view of some art historians that Perugino's apprentices did much of the work, although there is no clear consensus among art historians. As sceptics will doubtless point out, this is a small number of images. Furthermore, Dr. Farid knew before performing the analysis what results he expected. But he is the first to acknowledge that it is early days for his methodology. He hopes to study many more paintings. By looking at large numbers of paintings that are universally believed to be authentic, Dr. Farid hopes to be able to examine doubtful cases with confidence in the future. Even with the Bruegels--real and imitation--though, Dr. Farid's results are persuasive. It is tricky to describe exactly what it is that distinguishes the real ones from the imitations, but Dr. Farid says that it can be thought of as the nature of the artist's brushstroke. Unlike some analyses of Jackson Pollock's work that have been done over the past few years by Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon, Dr. Farid says his technique could, in principle, be used for any artist. What Dr. Farid did was to convert each work of art into a set of mathematical functions. These so-called wavelets describe particular parts of the image as a series of peaks and troughs of variable height and wavelength. By expressing an image this way, it is possible to compress that image while losing very little information. The sums of the wavelets from different images can then be compared. Once he did this, Dr. Farid found that the types of wavelets used to express authentic Bruegels were noticeably different from those used to express the imitations. (The Perugino was analysed by treating the six faces as distinct paintings.) It seems that curators may s6on be able to add another weapon to their anti-forgery arsenal.

单选题In 1960—1961, Chad had a good harvest of cotton because______.

单选题The word "spotlight" ( Last line, Par

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Five and a half years into his presidency, George Bush finally vetoed a bill this week. Oddly enough, it was one that most Americans support: it would have expanded foderal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. The House and Senate had both passed the bill by wide, but not veto-proof margins, so Mr. Bush's word is final, at least until after the mid-term elections in November. Stem cells are cells that have not yet decided what they want to be when they grow up. That is, they can become blood cells, brain cells, or pretty much any other type of cell. Their versatility makes them extremely useful for medical research. The ethical snag is that the best stem cells are harvested from human embryos, killing them. For the most ardent pro-lifers, including Mr. Bush and many of his core supporters, that is murder. Proponents of embryonic stem-cell research point out that hordes of embryos are created during fertility treatment, and the vast majority of these are either frozen indefinitely or destroyed. Is it really wrong to use them for potentially life-saving research? Yes, said Mr. Bush on July 19th, flanked by some families who had "adopted" other people's frozen embryos and used them to have children of their own. Mr. Bush's veto does not kill stem-cell research. Scientists who spurn federal cash may do as they please. The government still pays for research on stem cells taken from adults, a process that does not kill the donor. And a decision by Mr. Bush in 2001 allows federally-funded scientists to experiment on the few dozen embryonic stem-cell "lines" that already existed then, which can be propagated in a laboratory. Nonetheless, scientists are furious with Mr. Bush. Federal funding would surely push them faster towards those elusive cures. Research based on adult stem cells may be promising, but not nearly as promising as that based on embryonic ones. There are worries that those few dozen embryonic stem-cell lines represent too narrow a gene pool, and that they cannot be endlessly extended without damaging them. Other countries, such as Britain and China, are enthusiastically experimenting on embryonic stem cells. But the world's most innovative nation is hanging back.

单选题The selection implies that, more often, the value of an educational test rests with

单选题A few years ago, Facebook was forced to retreat from a new service called Beacon. It tracked what the social network's users were doing elsewhere on the web—which caused a huge (1) because Of the loss of personal privacy. (2) , Facebook promised to make (3) efforts to better protect people's information. But (4) the firm has not been trying very hard. On November 29th America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (5) the results of an investigation it had conducted of Facebook. They showed that the world's biggest social network, which now (6) more than 800 million users, has been making information public that it had (7) to keep private. The FTC's findings come at a(n) (8) time for Facebook, which is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) that is almost (9) to take place next year. Some recent reports have (10) that the firm may seek a listing as early as next spring, and that it will try to (11) a whopping $10 billion in an IPO that would (12) it at $100 billion. To (13) the way for an offering, Facebook (14) needs to resolve some of the regulatory tussles over privacy that it has become embroiled in. (15) the FTC's announcement, which came as part of a settlement struck between the commission and Facebook. The FTC's investigation (16) a litany of instances in which the social network had (17) its users. In what is perhaps the most damning of the findings, the agency documents that Facebook has been (18) people's personal information with advertisers—a practice its senior executives have (19) sworn it does not indulge in. The FTC also says that the firm failed to make photos and videos on deactivated and deleted user accounts (20) after promising to do so.