单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The American economy is growing, according to the most recent statistics, at the sizzling rate of 7%, and is in the middle of the largest peacetime expansion in American history. We read in the newspapers that practically everyone who wants a job can get one. Microsoft is running advertisements in the New York Times practically begging Congress to issue more visas for foreign computer and information technology workers. In this environment, it is shocking that one group of Americans, people with disabilities, have such a high level of unemployment: 30% are not employed the same percentage as when the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. Not only did their employment and labor earnings fall during the recession of the early 1990s, but employment and earnings continued to fall during the long economic expansion that followed. Many of these people are skilled professionals who are highly marketable in today's economy. Part of the problem is discrimination, and part recent court rulings favoring employers in ADA lawsuits. Discrimination against people with disabilities is, unfortunately, alive and well, despite the legal prohibitions against discrimination in hiring people with disabilities. 79% of disabled people who are unemployed cite discrimination in the workplace and lack of transportation as major factors that prevent them from working. Studies have also shown that people with disabilities who find jobs earn less than their co-workers, and are less likely to be promoted. Unfavorable court rulings have not been helpful, either. Research by law professor Ruth Colker of Ohio State University has shown that in the eight years after the ADA went into effect, employer-defendants prevailed in more than 93% of the eases decided by trial. Of the cases appealed, employers prevailed 84% of the time. Robert Burgdorf, Ir., who helped draft the ADA, has written, "legal analysis has proceeded quite a way down the wrong road." Disability activists and other legal scholars point out that Congress intended the ADA as a national mandate for the ending of discrimination against people-with disabilities. Instead, what has occurred, in the words of one writer, is that the courts "have narrowed the scope of the law, redefined 'disability,' raised the price of access to justice and generally deemed disability discrimination as not worthy of serious remedy." But perhaps the greatest single problem is the federal government itself, where laws and regulations designed to help disabled people actually provide an economic disincentive to work. As Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote, "the high unemployment rate among people receiving federal disability benefits is not because their federal benefits programs have 'front doors that are too big', but because they have 'back doors that are too small'."

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Most towns up to Elizabethan times were smaller than a modern village and each of them was built around its weekly market where local produce was brought for sale and the town folks sold their work to the people from the countryside and provided them with refreshment for the day. Trade was virtually confined to that one day even in a town of a thousand or so people. On market days craftsmen put up their stalls in the open air whilst on one or two other days during the week the townsman would pack up his loaves, or nails, or cloth, and set out early to do a day’s trade in the market of an adjoining town where, however, he would be charged a heavy toll for the privilege and get a less favourable spot for his stand than the local craftsmen. Another chance for him to make a sale was to the congregation gathered for Sunday morning worship. Although no trade was allowed anywhere during the hours of the service (except at annual fair times), after church there would be some trade at the church door with departing country folk. The trade of markets was almost wholly concerned with exchanging the products of the nearby countryside and the goods sold in the market but particularly in food retail dealing was distrusted as a kind of profiteering. Even when there was enough trade being done to afford a livelihood to an enterprising man ready to buy wholesale and sell retail, town authorities were reluctant to allow it. Yet there were plainly people who were tempted to “forestall the market” by buying goods outside it, and to “regrate” them, that is to resell them, at a higher price. The constantly repeated rules against these practices and the endlessly recurring prosecutions mentioned in the records of all the larger towns prove that some well-informed and sharp-witted people did these things. Every town made its own laws and if it was big enough to have craft guilds, these associations would regulate the business of their members and tried to enforce a strict monopoly of their own trades. Yet while the guild leaders, as craftsmen, followed fiercely protectionist policies, at the same time, as leading townsmen, they wanted to see a big, busy market yielding a handsome revenue in various dues and tolls. Conflicts of interest led to endless, minute regulations, changeable, often inconsistent, frequently absurd. There was a time in the fourteenth century, for example, when London fishmongers were not allowed to handle any fish that had not already been exposed for sale for three days by the men who caught it.

单选题Six years later, in an about-face, the FBI admits that federal agents fired tear gas canisters capable of causing a fire at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas in 1993. But the official said the firing came several hours before the structure burst into flames, killing 80 people including the Davidians' leader, David Koresh. "In looking into this, we've come across information that shows some canisters that can be deemed pyrotechnic in nature were fired--hours before the fire started," the official said. "Devices were fired at the bunker, not at the main structure where the Davidians were camped out." The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains it did not start what turned to be a series of fiery bursts of flames that ended a 51-day standoff between branch members and the federal government. "This doesn't change the bottom line that David Koresh started the fire and the government did not," the official said. "It simply Shows that devices that could probably be flammable were used in the early morning hours." The law enforcement official said the canisters were fired not at the main structure where the Davidian members were camped out but at the nearby underground bunker. They bounced off the bunker's concrete roof and landed in an open field well, the official said. The canisters were fired at around 6 a.m. , and the fire that destroyed the wooden compound started around noon, the official said. The official also added that other tear gas canisters used by agent that day were not flammable or potentially explosive. While Coulson denied the grenades played a role in starting the fire, his statement marked the first time that any U.S. government official has publicly contradicted the government's position that federal agents used nothing on the final day of the siege at Waco that could have sparked the fire that engulfed the compound. The cause of the fiery end is a major focus of an ongoing inquiry by the Texas Rangers into the Waco siege.

单选题We can learn from the text that both Hindus and Muslims are

单选题The main idea of the passage is best expressed by which of the following? _____

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} After decades of exile from U.S. courts, the science of lie detection is gaining new acceptance. But the federal government wants to put a stop to it, and the U.S. Supreme Court has now agreed to consider a request from the Department of Justice to bar the technology from military courts. Uncertainties surround the science of lie detection, which uses a device called polygraph. In 1991 President George Bush banned lie detector evidence in military courts. But that ban has since been overturned by the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, which ruled that it restricts defendants' rights to present evidence of their innocence. In the past two years, some federal courts have also ruled that polygraph evidence can be heard. This follows a decision by the Supreme Court in 1993 that gave federal judges more discretion to decide on the admissibility of evidence. A polygraph consists of monitors for pulse rate, sweating and breathing rate. The device is supposed to uncover lies by recording increases in these measures as the subject answers questions. Critics have always argued that cunning defendants can control their physiological responses and sway polygraph results. But supporters of the technique argue that recent research has found it to be reliable. A psychologist named Charles Honts at a state university in Idaho, points to lab oratory studies, some of them being his own, in which student-subjects were offered cash to sway the test results. This argument is rejected by Leonard Saxe, a psychologist at a Boston university. "There is a huge difference between students in a lab and a defendant," he says. Guilty defendants have time in which to rehearse their lies, and can even come to believe them to be true. Saxe believes that the entire theoretical basis of lie detection is invalid. "It assumes you will be more nervous lying than telling the truth." But he says that for some people lies are trivial, while certain truth can be hard to swallow. David Faigrnan of the University of California says that if the Supreme Court upholds the military appeal court's decision to allow polygraph evidence, polygraph bans. would be overturned in federal courts across U. S. "That will put a big burden on judges to understand the science, and lead to a lot more' expert testimony in the courts," he predicts. The justice department fears that this will greatly increase the cost of trials.

单选题An annual census of wolves at Yellowsto ne National Park has found a sharp drop in the population. But park biologists, who suspect a deadly disease, canine parvovirus, say they will let nature take its course. "Parvo can be vaccinated for and can be treated, but we wouldn't do it because we couldn't catch every animal," Daniel Stahler. a park waif biologist, said. "And this allows them to build up a natural resistance." The census found 22 pups, compared with 69 last year. The total count of wolves dropped m 118 from 171, the lowest since 2000. "It was somewhat devastating to have such poor pup survival," Mr. Stahler said. "But research shows that young pups can bounce back from it quite successfully." That pups have suffered the decline seems to suggest the culprit is parvo, said Ed Bangs, waif recovery coordinator for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service here. Nursing pups receive immunity from their mother's milk. but the immunity drops when nursing stops. The large number of wolves in the park might also be a factor. "When you have a big litter and adults are having trouble killing enough to feed all these pups, and the animals are stressed, parvo flares up," Mr. Bangs said. "If you have 15 brothers and sisters instead of 3, you don't get enough to eat; parvo kills you." Canine parvovirus was discovered in the United States in 1978. Extremely hardy, the disease spread rapidly to domestic dogs and then into wild animal populations. Biologists suspect that it was introduced to Yellowstone by a tourist's infected dog or a coyote. Because parvo is so hardy, it persists in the soil for months. A wolf could catch it from simply sniffing infectious soil. the biologists said. The disease has hit wolves on the northern range, the elk-filled meadows of the northern half of the park, especially hard. Out of 49 pups born there, 8 survived. Some scientists, including Mr. Bangs, theorize that the park may have overshot its capacity for wolves and that the numbers are naturally adjusting downward, with disease being one of the agents. The long-term carrying capacity of the park, he said, is probably 110 to 150 wolves. Wolves have been killed in other ways, too. Frequent encounters among competing wolf packs are the biggest cause of death among adults. In the first five years of their reintroduction to the park, one or two animals a year were killed by other wolves. That number has risen to four or five a year. Vehicles also take a toll, Fourteen wolves have been killed by vehicles in the last 10 years, eight of them near Mile Marker 30 on Route 191, a straight stretch on the western side of the park where motorists tend to speed and wolves are plentiful.

单选题Some people dislike fairy stories because they feel that they ______.

单选题"TheHeartoftheMatter,"thejust-releasedreportbytheAmericanAcademyofArtsandSciences(AAAS),deservespraiseforaffirmingtheimportanceofthehumanitiesandsocialsciencestotheprosperityandsecurityofliberaldemocracyinAmerica.Regrettably,however,thereport"sfailuretoaddressthetruenatureofthecrisisfacingliberaleducationmaycausemoreharmthangood.In2010,leadingcongressionalDemocratsandRepublicanssentletterstotheAAASaskingthatitidentifyactionsthatcouldbetakenby"federal,stateandlocalgovernments,universities,foundations,educators,individualbenefactorsandothers"to"maintainnationalexcellenceinhumanitiesandsocialscientificscholarshipandeducation."Inresponse,theAmericanAcademyformedtheCommissionontheHumanitiesandSocialSciences.Amongthecommission"s51membersaretop-tier-universitypresidents,scholars,lawyers,judges,andbusinessexecutives,aswellasprominentfiguresfromdiplomacy,filmmaking,musicandjournalism.Thegoalsidentifiedinthereportaregenerallyadmirable.Becauserepresentativegovernmentpresupposesaninformedcitizenry,thereportsupportsfullliteracy;stressesthestudyofhistoryandgovernment,particularlyAmericanhistoryandAmericangovernment;andencouragestheuseofnewdigitaltechnologies.Toencourageinnovationandcompetition,thereportcallsforincreasedinvestmentinresearch,thecraftingofcoherentcurriculathatimprovestudents"abilitytosolveproblemsandcommunicateeffectivelyinthe21stcentury,increasedfundingforteachersandtheencouragementofscholarstobringtheirlearningtobearonthegreatchallengesoftheday.Thereportalsoadvocatesgreaterstudyofforeignlanguages,internationalaffairsandtheexpansionofstudyabroadprograms.Unfortunately,despiteyearsinthemaking,"TheHeartoftheMatter"nevergetstotheheartofthematter:theilliberalnatureofliberaleducationatourleadingcollegesanduniversities.ThecommissionignoresthatforseveraldecadesAmerica"scollegesanduniversitieshaveproducedgraduateswhodon"tknowthecontentandcharacterofliberaleducationandarethusdeprivedofitsbenefits.Sadly,thespiritofinquiryonceathomeoncampushasbeenreplacedbytheuseofthehumanitiesandsocialsciencesasvehiclesforpublicizing"progressive,"orleft-liberalpropaganda.Today,professorsroutinelytreattheprogressiveinterpretationofhistoryandprogressivepublicpolicyasthepropersubjectofstudywhileportrayingconservativeorclassicalliberalideas—suchasfreemarkets,self-reliance—asfallingoutsidetheboundariesofroutine,andsometimeslegitimate,intellectualinvestigation.TheAAASdisplaysgreatenthusiasmforliberaleducation.YetitsreportmaywellsetbackreformbyobscuringthedepthandbreadthofthechallengethatCongressaskedittoilluminate.

单选题To today's Americans, productivity improvements

单选题The most thoroughly studied intellectuals in the history of the New World are the ministers and political leaders of seventeenth-century New England. According to the standard history of American philosophy, nowhere else in colonial America was "So much importance attached to intellectual pursuits." According to many books and articles, New England"s leaders established the basic themes and preoccupations of an unfolding, dominant Puritan tradition in American intellectual life. To take this approach to the New Englanders normally mean to start with the Puritans" theological innovations and their distinctive ideas about the church—important subjects that we may not neglect. But in keeping with our examination of southern intellectual life, we may consider the original Puritans as carriers of European culture, adjusting to New world circumstances. The New England colonies were the scenes of important episodes in the pursuit of widely understood ideals of civility and virtuosity. The early settlers of Massachusetts Bay included men of impressive education and influence in England. Besides the ninety or so learned ministers who came to Massachusetts churches in the decade after 1629, there were political leaders like John Winthrop, an educated gentleman, lawyer, and official of the Crown before he journeyed to Boston. These men wrote and published extensively, reaching both New World and Old World audiences, and giving New England an atmosphere of intellectual earnestness. We should not forget, however, that most New Englanders were less well educated. While few craftsmen or farmers, let alone dependents and servants, left literary compositions to be analyzed, it is obvious that their views were less fully intellectualized. Their thinking often had a traditional superstitious quality. A tailor named John Dane, who emigrated in the late 1630s, left an account of his reasons for leaving England that is filled with signs. Sexual confusion, economic frustrations, and religious hope—all came together in a decisive moment when he opened the Bible , told his father the first line he saw would settle his fate, and read the magical words: "come out from among them, touch no unclean thing, and I will be your God and you shall be my people." One wonders what Dane thought of the careful sermons explaining the Bible that he heard in puritan churches. Meanwhile, many settles had slighter religious commitments than Dane"s, as one clergyman learned in confronting folk along the coast who mocked that they had not come to the New world for religion. "Our main end was to catch fish."

单选题Work looks a better cure for poverty than welfare. Especially as fewer and fewer countries will be able to afford to pay potential workers to stay at home a Victorian idea is back in Favour: many poor people are better off when they are pulled back into the labour market. The idea revived first in the United States. There, in its harshest form, the unemployed work in exchange for welfare. But countries with governments to the left of America"s, including Labour Australia and Socialist France, are now also exploring ways to link income support and employment policy. Coming from different directions, the right and the left are gradually finding new common ground. For the right, it seems deplorable to encourage the poor to rely on the state for cash, because they get hooked on government help and accustomed to being poor. For the left, it seems deplorable to allow workers to drop out of the job market for long periods, because it makes it harder for them to find new jobs. For both, the answer is to get the poor to work. Most industrial countries have a two-tier system of social protection: a social-security scheme, where workers and their bosses make regular contributions in exchange for payments to workers when they are unemployed, sick or retired; and a safety-net, to give some income to those poor people who have exhausted their social insurance or who have none. The former is usually not means-tested but, for the unemployed, is of limited duration; the latter is almost always tied to income. The public tends to approve of contributory benefits, which is what designers of such schemes intended. Safety-net benefits carry no such sense of entitlement, and are less popular. Yet they have grown more rapidly in large part because the 1980-82 recession increased the number of people of working age who had exhausted their right to contributory benefits. And an increasing proportion of the poor are people for whom the contributory systems were never designed: the young and lone mothers. In consequence, payments which carry a clear entitlement have become less significant, compared with those which appear to depend purely on state charity. The rise in the bill for the unpopular kind of social protection comes at a time when governments want to curb state spending. It comes, too, at a time when many countries have done almost everything they can think of to protect the poor. A decade ago many on the left argued that poverty was usually caused by circmstances outside the control of the poor—a lack of jobs, disability, old age, racial discrimination, broken marriages. One way or another, governments have tried to tackle most of these problems. Still the poor remain.

单选题What would happen if consumers decided to simplify their lives and spend less on material goods and services? This (1) is taking on a certain urgency as rates of economic growth continue to decelerate throughout the industrialized world, and (2) millions of consumers appear to be (3) for more frugal lifestyle. The Stanford Research Institute, which has done some of the most extensive work on the frugality phenomenon, (4) that nearly five million American adults number " (5) to and act on some but not all" of its basic tenets. The frugality phenomenon first achieved prominence as a middle-class (6) of high-consumption lifestyle in the industrial world during the 50's and 60's. In the Silent Revolution, Ronald Ingehart of the University of Michingan' s Institute of Social Research examined this (7) in the United States and 10 Western European nations. He concluded that a change has taken place "from an (8) emphasis on material well-being and physical security (9) greater emphasis on the quality of life", that is, "a (10) from materialism to post-materialism". Inglehart calls the 60s the "fat year". Among their more visible trappings were the ragged blue jeans favored by the affluent young. Most of them (11) from materialism; however, this was (12) . Comfortably fixed Americans were going (13) , (14) making things last longer, sharing things with others, learning to do things for themselves and so on. But (15) economically significant, it was hardly (16) in a US Gross National Product climbing vigorously toward the ＄ 2 thousand billion mark. (17) , as the frugality phenomenon matured--growing out of the soaring 80s and into the somber 90s--it seemed to undergo a (18) transformation. American consumers continued to lose (19) in materialism and were being joined by new converts who were (20) frugality because of the darkening economic skies they saw ahead.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Reading the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. You’re your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} How did the company come to produce a record glorifying the murder of police, which is entitled Cop Killer by the rapper Ice-T on the album Boby Count ? The album is released by Warner Bros. Records, part of the Time Warner media and entertainment conglomerate. In a Wall Street Journal oped piece laying out the company's position, Time Warner co CEO Gerald Levin makes two defenses. First, Ice-T's Cop Killer is misunderstood. "It doesn't induce or glorify violence... It's his fictionalized attempt to get inside a character's head ... Cop Killer is no more a call for gunning down the police than Frankie and Johnny is a summons for jilted lovers to shoot one another.' Instead of "finding ways to silence the messenger," we should be "heeding the anguished cry contained in his message." This defense is self-contradictory. Frankie and Johnny does not pretend to have a political "message" that must be "heeded. ' If Cop Killer has a message, it is that the murder of policemen is a justified response to police brutality. And not in self-defense, but in premeditated acts of revenge against random cops. Killing policemen is a good thing--that is the plain meaning of the song, and no "larger understanding" of black culture, the rage of the streets or anything else can explain it away. As in much of .today's popular music, the line between performer and performance is purposely blurred. These are political sermonettes clearly intended to support the sentiments being expressed. Tracy Marrow (Ice-T) himself has said, "I scared the police, and they need to be scared." That seems clear. The company's second defense of Cop Killer is the classic one of free expression: "We stand for creative freedom. We believe that the worth of what an artist or journalist has to say does not depend on preapproval from a government official or a corporate censor." Of course Ice-T has the right to say whatever he wants. But that doesn't require any company to provide him an Outlet. And it doesn't relieve a company of responsibility for the messages it chooses to promote. Judgment is not "censorship. "Many an "anguished cry" goes unrecorded. This one was recorded, and promoted, because a successful artist under contract wanted to record it. Nothing wrong with making money, but a company cannot take the money and run from the responsibility. The founder of Time, Henry Luce, would have scorned the notion that his company provided a value-free forum for the exchange of ideas. In Luce's system, editors were supposed to make value judgments and promote the truth as they saw it.

单选题It's not that we thought things were fine. It's just that this year there were no fixes to the messes we made—no underwater off-well caps, no AIG bailouts, no reuniting the island castaways in a church and sending them to heaven. We had to idly watch things completely fall apart, making us feel so pathetic that planking seemed like a cool thing to do. This was the year of the meltdown. If a meltdown could happen at a nuclear reactor in Japan—a country so obsessed with keeping up to date that its citizens annually get new cell phones and a new Prime Minister—we should have known we were all doomed. Meltdowns happened to the most unlikely victims. Everyone was so vulnerable to meltdowns that even Canadians rioted, though they did it only so the rest of the world wouldn't feel bad about their riots. It didn't take a tsunami; anything could trigger a meltdown. Greece, a country so economically insignificant that its biggest global financial contribution to this century was that Nia Vardalos movie, sent the entire European economy into a meltdown. A meltdown of both the U. S. credit rating and Congress's approval rating was unleashed over raising the debt ceiling, something so routine and boring. Sometimes, it didn't take an actual sexual affair to ruin your promising political career. Sometimes, crises sprang out of tiny mistakes that usually have no consequences whatsoever, like that day in college when you went to a protest, charged a couple more things on your nearly maxed-out credit card and drunkenly told the pizza guy with all the dumb ideas that he should totally run for President. Well, when the entire country does that at once, you get a meltdown. There was even a meltdown of the once powerful American middle class. A year ago ours was still a country that pretended there was no class system, where rich people all called themselves "upper-middle class". Now we are full-on feudal, with an angry 99% and a 1% who actually understand the things which the 99% are inarticulately complaining about. The meltdown itself melted down when Occupy Wall Street protesters and police couldn't agree on lawn care. It's too late to cool the rods. We are either going to abandon the old structures altogether—nuclear power, the euro, Arab secular role, unregulated capitalism—or wait a really long time for things to get better. We are finally going to have to choose between our modern love of constant drama and our modem laziness. I know which I'm betting on. Laziness has a really high melting point.