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单选题"The impulse to excess among young Britons remains as powerful as ever, but the force that used to keep the impulse in check has all but disappeared," claimed a newspaper. Legislation that made it easier to get hold of a drink was "an Act for the increase of drunkenness and immorality", asserted a politician. The first statement comes from 2005, the second from 1830. On both occasions, the object of scorn was a parliamentary bill that promised to sweep away "antiquated" licensing laws. As liberal regulations came into force this week, Britons on both sides of the debate unwittingly followed a 19th-century script. Reformers then, as now, took a benign view of human nature. Make booze cheaper and more readily available, said the liberalisers, and drinkers would develop sensible, continental European style ways. Nonsense, retorted the critics. Habits are hard to changer if Britons can drink easily, they will drink more. Worryingly for modern advocates of liheralisation, earlier doomsayers turned out to be right. Between 1820 and 1840, consumption of malt (which is used to make beer) increased by more than 50%. Worse, Britons developed a keener taste for what Thomas Carlyle called "liquid madness"--gin and other spirits. The backlash was fierce. Critics pointed to widespread debauchery in the more disreputable sections of the working class. They were particularly worried about the people who, in a later age, came to be known as "ladettes". An acute fear, says Virginia Berridge, who studies temperance at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was that women would pass on their sinful ways to their children. In the 19th century, temperance organisations set up their own newspapers to educate the public about the consequences of excess. That, at least, has changed: these days, the mainstream media rail against the demon drink all by themselves.
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单选题To produce the upheaval (激变) in the United States that changed and modernized the domain of higher education from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, three primary causes interacted. The (1) of a half-dozen leaders in education provided the personal force that was needed. (2) , an outcry (呐喊) for a fresher, more practical, and more advanced kind of instruction (3) among the alumni (校友) and friends of nearly all of the old colleges and grew into a movement that overrode (压倒) all (4) opposition. The aggressive "Young Yale" movement appeared, demanding partial alumni control, a more (5) spirit, and a broader course of study. The graduates of Harvard College simultaneously (6) to relieve the college's poverty and demand new (7) . Education was pushing toward higher standards in the East by (8) off church leadership everywhere, and in the West by finding a wider range of studies and a new (9) of public duty. The old-style classical education received its most crushing (10) in the citadel (城堡) of Harvard College, (11) Dr. Charles Eliot, a young captain of thirty-five, son of a former treasurer of Harvard, led the (12) forces. Five revolutionary advances were made during the first years of Dr. Eliot's (13) They were the elevation and amplification of entrance requirements, the enlargement of the (14) and the development of the (15) system, the recognition of graduate study in the liberal arts, the raising of professional training in law, medicine, and engineering to a postgraduate level, and the fostering (培养) of greater (16) in student life. Standard of admission were sharply advanced in 1872—1877. (17) the appointment of a clean (院长) to take charge of student affairs, and a wise handling of (18) , the undergraduates were led to regard themselves more as young gentlemen and (19) as young animals. One new course of study after another was (20) —science, music, the history of the fine arts, advanced Spanish, political economy, physics and international law.
单选题In the first sentence of Paragraph 4, "Wasichus" probably refers to ______.
单选题The stretch of the Pacific between Hawaii and California is virtually empty. There are no islands, no shipping lanes, no human presence for thousands of miles—just sea, sky and rubbish. The prevailing currents cause flotsam from around the world to accumulate in a vast becalmed patch of ocean. In places, there are a million pieces of plastic per square kilometre. That can mean as much as 112 times more plastic than plankton, the first link in the marine food chain. All this adds up to perhaps 100m tonnes of floating garbage, and more is arriving every day. Wherever people have been—and some places where they have not—they have left waste behind. Litter lines the world's roads; dumps dot the landscape; slurry and sewage slosh into rivers and streams. Up above, thousands of fragments of defunct spacecraft careen through space, and occasionally more debris is produced by collisions such as the one that destroyed an American satellite in mid-February. Ken Noguchi, a mountaineer, estimates that he has collected nine tonnes of rubbish from the slopes of Mount Everest during five clean-up expeditions. There is still plenty left. The average Westerner produces over 500kg of municipal waste a year—and that is only the most obvious portion of the rich world's discards. In Britain, for example, municipal waste from households and businesses makes up just 24% of the total. In addition, both developed and developing countries generate vast quantities of construction and demolition debris, industrial effluent, mine tailings, sewage residue and agricultural waste. Extracting enough gold to make a typical wedding ring, for example, can generate three tonnes of mining waste. Rubbish may be universal, but it is little studied and poorly understood. Nobody knows how much of it the world generates or what it does with it. In many rich countries, and most poor ones, only the patchiest of records are kept. That may be understandable: by definition, waste is something its owner no longer wants or takes much interest in. Ignorance spawns scares, such as the fuss surrounding New York's infamous garbage barge, which in 1987 sailed the Atlantic for six months in search of a place to dump its load, giving many Americans the false impression that their country landfills had run out of space. It also makes it hard to draw up sensible policies: just think of the endless debate about whether recycling is the only way to save the planet ran expensive waste of time.
单选题Many strict naturalists' attitudes towards the categorizing of naturalists might be
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}}
It might take only the touch of peach
fuzz to make an autistic child howl in pain. The odour of the fruit could be so
Overpowering that he gags. For reasons that are not well understood,
people with autism do not integrate all of their senses in ways that help them
understand properly what they are experiencing. By the age of three, the signs
of autism-- infrequent eye contact, over-sensitivity or under-sensitivity
to the environment, difficulty mixing with others are in full force.
There is no cure; intense behavioural therapies serve only to lessen the
symptoms. The origins of autism are obscure. But a paper in
Brain, a specialist journal, casts some light. A team headed by Marcel Just, of
Carnegie Mellon University, and Nancy Minshew, of the University of Pittsburgh,
has found evidence of how the brains of people with autism function differently
from those without the disorder. Using a brain-scanning
technique called functional magnetic-resonance imaging (FMRI), Dr. Just, Dr.
Minshew and their team compared the brain activity of young adults who had
"high functioning" autism (in which an autist's IQ score is normal) with that of
non-autistic participants. The experiment was designed to examine two regions of
the brain known to be associated with language--Broca's area and Wernicke's
area--when the participants were reading. Three differences
emerged. First, Wernicke's area, the part responsible for understanding
individual words, was more active in autists than non-autists. Second, Broca's
area--where the components of language are integrated to produce meaning--was
less active. Third, the activity of the two areas was less
synchronised. This research has led Dr. Just to offer an
explanation for autism, lie calls it "undereonnectivity theory". It
depends on a recent body of work which suggests that the brain's white matter
(the wiring that connects the main Bodies of the nerve ceils, or grey matter,
together) is less dense and less abundant in the brain of an autistic person
than in that of a non-autist. Dr. Just suggests that abnormal white matter
causes the grey matter to adapt to the resulting lack of communication. This
hones some regions to levels of superior ability, while others fall by the
wayside. The team chose to examine Broca's and Wernieke's areas
because language-based experiments are easy to conduct. But if the
underconnectivity theory applies to. the rest of the brain, too, it would be
less of a mystery why some people with autism are hypersensitive to their
environments, and others are able to do certain tasks, such as arithmetic, so
well. And if it is true that underconnectivity is indeed the main problem,
then treatments might be developed to stimulate the growth of the
white-matter wiring.
单选题You could benefit from flipping through the pages of I Can't Believe You Asked That, a book by author Phillip Milano that's subtitled, A No-Holds-Barred Q & A About Race, Sex, Religion, and Other Terrifying Topics. For the past seven years, Milano--who describes himself as "a straight, white middle class married guy raised in an affluent suburb of Chicago'--has operated yforum, com, a Web site that was created to get us talking. Through the posting of probing, provocative and sometimes simply inane questions and the answers they generate, people are encouraged to have a no-holds-barred exchange on topics across racial, ethnic and cultural lines. More often than not, the questions grow out of our biases and fears and the stereotypes that fuel misunderstanding among us. As with the Web site, Milano hopes his book will be a social and cultural elixir. "The time is right for a new culture of curiosity' to begin to unfold, with people finally breaking clown the last barrier to improve race and cultural relations" by actually talking to each other about their differences, Milano said in an e-mail message to me. Milano wisely used the Internet to spark these conversations. In seven years, it has generated 50,000 postings--many of them questions that people find hard to ask in a face-to-face exchange with the subjects of their inquiries. But in his book, which was published earlier this month, Milano gives readers an opportunity to read the questions and a mix of answers that made it onto his Web site. "I am curious about what people who have been blind from birth 'see' in their dreams," a 13-year- old boy wanted to know. "Why do so many mentally disabled people have such poor-looking haircuts and 'nerdy' clothes?" a woman asked. "How do African-Americans perceive God?" a white teenager wanted to know. "Do they pray to a white God or a black God?" Like I said, these questions can generate a range of emotions and reactions. But the point of Milano's Web site, and his book, is not to get people mad, but to inform us "about the lives and experiences" of others. Though many of the answers that people offered to the questions posed in his book are conflicting, these responses are balanced by the comments of experts whose responses to the queries also appear in the book. Getting people to openly say what they are thinking about things that give rise to stereotypes and bigotry has never been easy. Most of us save those conversations for gatherings of people who look or think like us.
单选题Prince Klemens Von Metternich, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, would have no trouble recognizing Google. To him, the world's most popular web-search engine would closely resemble the Napoleonic France that in his youth humiliated Austria and Europe's other powers. Its rivals—Yahoo!, the largest of the traditional web gateways, eBay, the biggest online auction and trading site, and Microsoft, a software empire that owns MSN, a struggling web portal—would look a lot like Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Metternich responded by forging an alliance among those three monarchies to create a "balance of power" against France. Google's enemies, he might say, ought now to do the same thing. Google announced two new conquests on August 7th. It struck a deal with Viacom, an "old" media firm, under which it will syndicate video clips from Viacom brands such as MTV and Nickelodeon to other websites, and integrate advertisements into them. This makes Google the clear leader in the fledgling but promising market for web-video advertising. It also announced a deal with News Corporation, another media giant, under which it will pro-vide all the search and text-advertising technology on News Corporation's websites, including My Space, an enormously popular social-networking site. These are hard blows for Yahoo! and MSN, which had also been negotiating with News Corporation. Both firms have been losing market share in web search to Google over the past year—Google now has half the market. They have also fallen further behind in their advertising technologies and networks, so that both make less money than Google does from the same number of searches. Safa Rashtchy, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, a securities firm, estimates that for every advertising dollar that Google makes on a search query, Yahoo! makes only 60-70cents. Last month Yahoo! said that a new advertising algorithm that it had designed to close the gap in profitability will be delayed, and its share price fell by 22% , its biggest-ever one-day drop. MSN is further behind Google than Yahoo! in search, and its parent, Microsoft, faces an even more fundamental threat from the expansionist new power. Many of Google's new ventures beyond web search enable users to do things free of charge through their web browsers that they now do using Microsoft software on their personal computers. Google offers a rudimentary but free online word processor and spreadsheet, for instance. The smaller eBay, on the other hand, might in one sense claim Google as an ally. Google's search results send a lot of traffic to eBay's auction site, and eBay is one of the biggest advertisers on Google's network. But the relationship is imbalanced. An influential re-cent study from Berkeley's Haas School of Business estimated that about 12% of eBay's revenues come indirectly from Google, whereas Google gets only 3% of its revenues from eBay. Worst of all for eBay, Google is starting to undercut its core business. Sellers are setting up their own websites and buying text advertisements from Google, and buyers are using its search rather than eBay to connect with sellers directly. As a result, "eBay would be wise to strike a deep partnership with Yahoo! or Microsoft in order to regain a balance of power in the industry," said the study's authors, Julien Decot and Steve Lee, sounding like diplomats at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.
单选题The fourth paragraph explained that
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单选题Commencement is supposed to be filled with hope, but for the class of 2010, these are grim times. Over the past year, the unemployment rate for college graduates under age 25 has averaged 9.1 percent. For the roughly half of high school graduates under 25 and not in college, the average is 22.8 percent. Worse, a deep labor recession, like this one, may be more than a temporary hardship. It could signal a long-term decline in living standards—downward mobility. Where you start out in your career has a big impact on where you end up. When jobs are scarce, more college grads start out in lower-level jobs with lower starting salaries. Academic research suggests that for many of these graduates, that correlates to overall lower levels of career attainment and lower lifetime earnings. The pat answer is that college students should consider graduate school as a way to delay a job search until things turn around, and that more high school students should go to college to improve their prospects. For many undergraduates, especially those with large student debts, graduate school would be prohibitively expensive. And while more than half of this year's high school grads are expected to be enrolled in college in the fall, most will have to work to help pay the bills. For them, college is not a retreat from a bad job market; a bad market is an obstacle to a college degree. Washington has not been helping enough. The 2009 stimulus package has supported some 2. 5 million jobs, helping to avert a much deeper recession. The economy is still missing more than 10 million jobs, and unless more is done to spur employment, the impact on many new graduates and other workers will be harsh. The measures should be passed quickly. But recent debates suggests that the Republicans—in their role as nouveau deficit hawks—are likely to oppose more job-related spending unless it is paid for. The deficit needs to be addressed when the economy recovers. Right now, tax increases or spending cuts would only reduce economic activity, weakening the boost the measures are supposed to provide. In the longer term, Congress will also need to do more to foster jobs and industries of the future, like green technology. Several taxes could be enacted to help finance longer-term efforts, including the bank tax proposed by President Obama. Congress and the administration should also consider a financial transactions tax, both to curb speculation and to raise revenue to rebuild the economy that was damaged, in large part, by the banks' recklessness. Without a bigger vision, more money and political courage, the future for those just entering the job market and those already there looks bleak for years to come.
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单选题Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner nine days ago has already created a debate over politics, the press and humor. Now, a commercial rivalry has broken out over its rebroadcast. On Wednesday, C-Span, the nonprofit network that first showed Mr. Colbert's speech, wrote letters to the video sites YouTube.com and ifilm.com, demanding that the clips of the speech be taken off their Web sites. The action was a first for C-Span, whose prime-time schedule tends to feature events like Congressional hearings on auto fuel-economy standards. "We have had other hot—I hate to use that word—videos that generated a lot of buzz," said Rob Kennedy, executive vice president of C-Span, which was founded in 1979. "But this is the first time it has occurred since the advent of the video clipping sites." After the clips of Mr. Colbert's performance were ordered taken down at You Tube—where 41 clips of the speech had been viewed a total of 2.7 million times in less than 48 hours, according to the site—there were rumblings on left-wing sites that someone was trying to silence a man who dared to speak truth to power. But as became clear later in the week. this was a business decision, not a political one. Not only is the entire event available to be streamed at C-Span's Web site. c-span, org, but the network is selling DVD's of the event for $24.95, including speeches and a comedy routine by President Bush with a President Bush imitator. And C-Span gave permission to Google Videos to carry the Colbert speech beginning Friday. The arrangement, which came with the stipulation that Google Videos provide the entire event and a clip of Mr. Bush's entire routine as well, is a one-time deal. Peter Chane, senior product manager of Google Video, said "C-Span has some very, very unique content," adding that "online is really great distribution outlet". But Julie Supan, senior director for marketing at YouTube, said officials there were stung by C-Span's behavior, because, she said, the site had helped fuel momentum for the Colbert clip. "This was an exciting moment for them in a viral, random way," she said. "To take it down from one site and uploding on another, it is perplexing./
单选题If American investors have learned any lesson in the last 25 years, it is to buy shares on the dips. The slide in 2000--2002 may have been longer and deeper than they were used to but normal service was eventually resumed, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a record high on October 1st. Among American financial commentators, it is almost universally accepted that shares always rise over the long run. And one ought to expect shares (which are risky) to deliver a higher return than risk free assets such as government bonds. Nevertheless, investors ought also to remember the world's second largest economy, Japan. Its most popular stock-market average, the Nikkei 225, peaked at 38,915 on the last trading day of the 1980s; this week, nearly 18 years later, it is still only around 17,000, less than half its peak. Buying on the dips did not work either. Professionals of the London Business School examined the record of 16 stock markets which were in continuous operation over the course of the 20th century. In itself, this selection showed survivorship bias by excluding the likes of Russia and China. The academies found that only three other countries could match the American record of having no 20-year periods with negative real returns. Other investors were far less lucky. Japanese, French, German and Spanish investors all suffered instances where they had to wait 50--60 years to earn a positive real return. It was no good following the famous advice to "put the shares in a drawer and forget about them"; the furniture would not have lasted that long. Besides survivorship bias, there is another problem with the belief that stock markets must always go up. Investors will keep buying until prices reach stratospheric(稳定的) levels. That clearly happened in Japan in the late 1980s, and after seven years, it is still not much more than half its peak level. A significant proportion of the return from equities in the second half of the 20(上标)th century came from a re-rating of shares; investors were willing to pay a higher multiple for profits. But re-rating cannot continue forever. If investors want a simple parallel with share prices, they need only mm to the American housing market. Back in 2005 an economic adviser to the president said," We've never had a decline in housing prices on a nationwide basis. What I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize." Lots of people took the same view and were willing to borrow (and lend) on a vast scale on the grounds that higher house prices would always bail them out. They are now counting their losses. Investors in equities should beware of over-committing themselves on the basis of a similar belief Just ask the Japanese.
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单选题The ethical judgments of the Supreme Court justices have become an important issue recently. The court cannot (1) its legitimacy as guardian of the rule of law (2) justices behave like politicians. Yet, in several instances, justices acted in ways that (3) the court's reputation for being independent and impartial. Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, appeared at political events. That kind of activity makes it less likely that the court's decisions will be (4) as impartial judgments. Part of the problem is that the justices are not (5) by an ethics code. At the very least, the court should make itself (6) to the code of conduct that (7) to the rest of the federal judiciary. This and other similar cases (8) the question of whether there is still a (9) between the court and politics. The framers of the Constitution envisioned law (10) having authority apart from politics. They gave justices permanent positions (11) they would be fiee to (12) those in power and have no need to (13) political support. Our legal system was designed to set law apart from politics precisely because they are so closely (14) . Constitutional law is political because it results from choices rooted in fundamental social (15) like liberty and property. When the court deals with social policy decisions, the law it (16) is inescapably political—which is why decisions split along ideological lines are so easily (17) as unjust. The justices must (18) doubts about the court's legitimacy by making themselves (19) to the code of conduct. That would make their rulings more likely to be seen as separate from politics and, (20) , convincing as law.
