单选题Quite apart from any awkwardness in the way he handled the hostile bid by rival Oracle for the firm he was running, Craig Conway seems to have been an unpopular CEO of PeopleSoft, a large enterprise-software company. Three managers who reported directly to him were apparently close to resigning in frustration, and the board was unhappy about "mis-statements" he made to analysts. So even though there was no "smoking gun", as the board put it, Mr. Conway was fired on October 1st and replaced by the firm's founder, David Duffield. Mr. Duffield's brief is now to address Mr. Conway's perceived shortcomings and his obsession with fending off the $ 7.7 billion takeover bid from Oracle. At the same time, says Paul Hamerman of Forrester, a research firm, Mr. Conway offered no compelling technological vision for PeopleSoft, and seemed deaf to "quite a noise level of customer complaints". Mr. Conway's firing prompted much speculation that PeopleSoft might now be more prepared to negotiate with Oracle rather than fight it. But PeopleSoft insists that both Mr. Duffield and the board focus on a long-term strategy for the company, not a quick sale. On the same day that Mr. Conway was fired, however, Oracle scored another victory when America's Justice Department said that it would not appeal against a judge's decision to allow the takeover on antitrust grounds. So, this week, the battle moved to another courtroom, in Delaware, where both companies are registered. In this suit, Oracle is claiming that People. Soft is not properly looking after the interests of its shareholders by using a "poison pill" and a "customer assurance programme" to keep Oracle at bay. The poison pill is a very common provision, and one that PeopleSoft has had for almost a decade. It floods the market with new shares if a predator buys more than 20% of PeopleSoft's equity, thus making an acquisition very difficult. The customer-rebate programme, by contrast, was put in place last June. It guarantees that any PeopleSoft client can get a refund for between two and five times its software-licence fee if support for that software is ever cut off. To Oracle, this represents another dirty tactic, since it amounts to a potential liability of more than $ 2 billion. To PeopleSoft, however, it was not only fair but necessary to retain customers, since Oracle said at the time of its bid that it planned to kill PeopleSoft's products and switch clients to its own. The two companies lawyers are likely to be at it for another few weeks, which could yet see a higher bid from Oracle.

单选题Why did it take so long to develop the X-ray microscope?

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Until recently, mobile radio was to wireless communications what the Yugo was to transportation. With a mixed clientele ranging from truckers using CBs to police armed with walkie-talkies to taxi drivers dispatched by radio, it was viewed as an unglamorous business and a technological backwater. But specialized mobile radio, as it is known, has been rediscovered. It is now considered one of the biggest prizes in the all-out war for the public airwaves. The reason: high-tech companies have figured out how to profitably rebuild the antiquated dispatching system into an advanced cellular-telephone network that can take on the likes of AT ＆ T and the giant Baby Bells. Upstart Nextel Communications sent shock waves through the industry last week when it agreed to buy Motorola's SMR frequencies for ＄1.8 billion. That could pose a serious threat to cellular hegemony. Although both systems are based on the same basic technology, SMR systems are digital and cover almost 25 times as much area as the average cellular network. SMR handsets won't work on cellular systems and tend to be bulkier than cellular phones, though they provide more features, like a digital pager service. And while cellular growth has tripled to some 13 million subscribers since 2000, the technology has been losing ground. It is running out of channel capacity so fast, in fact, that 40% of cellular calls in high-density areas like Manhattan and Los Angeles fail to be completed. SMRs have capacity to spare, and service could eventually be priced 10% to 15% less than cellular. Dispatchers predict they will have at least 10 million subscribers by the end of the decade. There are now about 1.5 million users of SMRs. The addition of another contender to an already crowded field of telephone systems will surely multiply the confusion. By the year 2010, consumers will be able to choose from at least half a dozen vendors of a dizzying array of wireless-communications services, including pagers, voice mail answering machines and cellular phones. Phone and cable television operators, such as Bell South, MCI and Cox Enterprises, are developing so-called personal-communications networks, or PCNs, a highly advanced portable-phone system that is expected to cover a wider area, connect to a greater variety of services and be cheaper to operate than conventional cellular. And many companies that have gambled on the wrong technological standards, and invested billions trying to develop the same markets, will undoubtedly lose a great deal of money before the shakeout is over. "The winners," says Nextel chairman Morgan O'Brien, "will be those who can make the choice for consumers easy." With all the anticipated confusion--mindful of the early years of personal computers--it is likely to be years before anyone calls the purchase of wireless products an "easy" choice.

单选题Human relations have commanded people's attention from early times. The ways of people have been recorded in innumerable myths, folktales, novels, poems, plays, and popular or philosophical essays. Although the full significance of a human relationship may not be directly evident, the complexity of feelings and actions that can be understood at a glance is surprisingly great. For this reason psychology holds a unique position among the sciences. " Intuitive " knowledge may be remarkably penetrating and can significantly help us understand human behavior whereas in the physical sciences such common sense knowledge is relatively primitive. If we erased all knowledge of scientific physics from our world, not only would we not have cars and television sets, we might even find that the ordinary person was unable to cope with the fundamental mechanical problems of pulleys and levers. On the other hand, if we removed all knowledge of scientific psychology from our world, problems in interpersonal relations might easily be coped with and solved much as before. We would still " know " how to avoid doing something asked of us and how to get someone to agree with us: we would still " know " when someone was angry and when someone was pleased. One could even offer sensible explanations for the " whys " of much of the self's behavior and feelings. In other words, the ordinary person has a great and profound understanding of the self and of other people which though unformulated or only vaguely conceived, enables one to interact with others in more or less adaptive ways. Kohler in referring to the lack of great discoveries in psychology as compared with physics, accounts for this by saying that " people were acquainted with practically all territories of mental life a long time before the founding of scientific psychology. " Paradoxically, with all this natural, intuitive, commonsense capacity to grasp human relations, the science of human relations had been one of the last to develop. Different explanations of this paradox have been suggested. One is that science would destroy the vain and pleasing illusions people have about themselves; but we might ask why people have always loved to read pessimistic, debunking writings, from Ecclesiastes to Freud. It has also been proposed that just because we know so much about people intuitively, there has been less incentive for studying them scientifically: why should one develop a theory, carry out systematic observations, or make predictions about the obvious? In any case, the field of human relations, with its vast literary documentation but meager scientific treatment, is in great contrast to the field of physics in which there are relatively few nonscientific books.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on Answer Sheet 1. Greg Focker, played by Ben Stiller, represents a generation of American kids{{U}} (1) {{/U}}in the 1980s on the philosophy that any achievement, however slight,{{U}} (2) {{/U}}a ribbon.{{U}} (3) {{/U}}replaced punishment; criticism became a dirty word. In Texas, teachers were advised to{{U}} (4) {{/U}}using red ink, the colour of{{U}} (5) {{/U}}. In California, a task force was set up to{{U}} (6) {{/U}}the concept of self worth into the education system. Swathing youngsters in a{{U}} (7) {{/U}}shield of self-esteem, went the philosophy, would protect them from the nasty things in life, such as bad school grades, underage sex, drug abuse, dead-end jobs and criminality. {{U}} (8) {{/U}}that the ninth-place ribbons are in danger of strangling the{{U}} (9) {{/U}}children they were supposed to help. America's{{U}} (10) {{/U}}with self-esteem--like all developments in psychology, it gradually{{U}} (11) {{/U}}its way to Britain--has turned children who were{{U}} (12) {{/U}}with{{U}} (13) {{/U}}into adults who{{U}} (14) {{/U}}at even the mildest brickbats. Many believe that the feel-good culture has risen at the{{U}} (15) {{/U}}of traditional education, an opinion espoused in a new book, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add, by the conservative commentator Charles Sykes. Not only that, but the foundations{{U}} (16) {{/U}}which the self-esteem industry is built are being{{U}} (17) {{/U}}as decidedly shaky. Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University and once a self-esteem enthusiast, is now{{U}} (18) {{/U}}a revision of the populist orthodoxy. "After all these years, I'm sorry to say, my recommendation is this: forget, about self-esteem and{{U}} (19) {{/U}}more on self-control and self-dlscipline," he wrote recently. "Recent work suggests this would be good for the individual and good for society--and might even be able to{{U}} (20) {{/U}}some of those promises that self-esteem once made but could not keep."

单选题Why are many churches called tinder-box?

单选题The author mentioned Intel in order to______.

单选题Halfway through" The Rebel Sell," the authors pause to make fun of" free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not, in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But" a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earth-worm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark corner of the barn. Only about 15% of" free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them. This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that" the counterculture," in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud, the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville"," The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world's funniest joke. Why range so widely? The authors' beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization, or buy fair-trade coffee and flee-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein ("No Logo") and Alissa Quart("Branded"), come in for special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions. Anticipating criticism, perhaps, Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural" arms race": each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors'. Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. (This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure.) But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticise every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain, for homogenisation, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathise with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were. Still,it would be a shame if the book' s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War Ⅱ critiques of modem society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humour to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.

单选题The title which best expresses the idea of this text is

单选题According to the passage, Craig Conway

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}} Addiction is such a harmful behavior, in fact, that evolution should have long ago weeded it out of the population: if it's hard to drive safely under the influence, imagine trying to run from a saber-toothed tiger or catch a squirrel for lunch, And yet, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIDA and a pioneer in the use of imaging to understand addiction, "the use of drugs has been recorded since the beginning of civilization. Humans in my view will always want to experiment with things to make them feel good." That's because drugs of abuse co-opt the very brain functions that allowed our distant ancestors to survive in a hostile world. Our minds are programmed to pay extra attention to what neurologists call salience—that is, special relevance. Threats, for example, are highly salient, .which is why we instinctively try to get away from them. But so are food and sex because they help the individual and the species survive. Drugs of abuse capitalize on this ready-made programming. When exposed to drugs, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning kick in—salience in overdrive—to create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving. "Some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction," says Volkow. "But because it involves these basic brain functions, everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol." That can go for nonchemical addictions as well. Behaviors, from gambling to shopping to sex, may start out as habits but slide into addictions. Sometimes there might be a behavior-specific root of the problem. Volkow's research group, for example, has shown that pathologically obese people who are compulsive eaters exhibit hyperactivity in the areas of the brain that process food stimuli—including the mouth, lips and tongue. For them, activating these regions is like opening the floodgates to the pleasure center. Almost anything deeply enjoyable can turn into an addiction, though. Of course, not everyone becomes an addict. That's because we have other, more analytical regions that can evaluate consequences and override mere pleasure seeking. Brain imaging is showing exactly how that happens. Paulus, for example, looked at drug addicts enrolled in a VA hospital's intensive four-week rehabilitation program. Those who were more likely to relapse in the first year after completing the program were also less able to complete tasks involving cognitive skills and less able to adjust to new rules quickly. This suggested that those patients might also be less adept at using analytical areas of the brain while performing decision-making tasks. Sure enough, brain scans showed that there were reduced levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought can override impulsive behavior. It's impossible to say if the drugs might have damaged these abilities in the relapsers—an effect rather than a cause of the chemical abuse--but the fact that the cognitive deficit existed in only some of the drug users suggests that there was something innate that was unique to them. To his surprise, Paulus found that 80% to 90% of the time, he could accurately predict who would relapse within a year simply by examining the scans. Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain's reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can reduce the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug's hold.

单选题The first time I tried shark-fin soup was at Time Warner"s annual dinner in Hong Kong. Shark-fin soup is a luxury item ($100 bowl in some restaurants)in Hong Kong and Mainland China, its biggest consumers; it"s a dish that embodies east Asia"s intertwined notions of hospitality and keeping (or losing) "face". "It"s like champagne", says Alvin Leung, owner of Bo Innovation, a Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong. "You don"t open a bottle of Coke to celebrate. It"s a ritual . " Unfortunately, this gesture of hospitality comes with a price tag much bigger than that $ 100 bowl. All told, up to 70 million sharks are killed annually for the trade, despite the fact that 30% of shark species are threatened with extinction . "Sharks have made it through multiple mass extinctions on our planet, " says Matt Rand, director of Pew"s Global Shark Conservation division. "Now many species are going to go the way of the dinosaur—for a bowl of soup. " The shark-fin industry has gained notoriety in recent years not just because of what it"s doing to the global shark population but also because of what"s known as finning—the practice of catching a shark, removing its fins and dumping the animal back into the sea. While a pound of shark fin can go for up to $ 300, most shark meat isn"t particularly valuable, and it takes up freezer space and weight on fishing boats. Today, finning is illegal in the waters of the E. U. , the U. S. and Australia, among others; boats are required to carry a certain ratio of fins to carcasses (尸体) to prevent massive overfishing. But there are loopholes in antifinning laws that are easy to exploit. In the E. U. , for example, ships can land the fins separately from the carcasses, making the job of monitoring the weight ratio nearly impossible. In the U. S. , a boat found carrying nearly 65, 000 lb. ( 30, 000 kg) of illegal shark fins won a court case because it was registered as a cargo vessel, which current U. S. finning. laws do not cover. Sharks populations can"t withstand commercial fishing the way more fertile marine species can. Unlike other fish harvested from the wild, sharks grow slowly. They don"t reach sexual maturity until later in life—the female great white, for example, at 12 to 14 years—and when they do, they have comparatively few offspring at a time, unlike, tunas , which release millions of eggs when they spawn. The shark"s plight is starting to be weighed against the delicacy"s cultural value. The conservation group has lobbied local restaurants that offer the classic nine-course banquet served at Cantonese weddings, of which shark fin is traditionally a part, to offer a no-shark menu as a choice to couples. After my first encounter with shark-fin soup, I decided that, like my colleagues, I would probably skip it next time. Unfortunately, that next time came at an intimate dinner in a small, private dining room, where I was both a guest and a stranger. When the soup—the centerpiece of the meal—was set down before me, I ate it. Apparently, I"m not the only one to cave . "You go to a wedding, and you refused to eat it just because you feel you"re insulted— I"m not that extreme, " Leung, the chef, says. "If other people believe that it brings luck .or brings face, I"d be a spoilsport . "To make a dent in the slaughter of the sharks, however, there are going to have to be a lot of people willing to spoil this particular sport.

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 ma ANSWER SHEET 1. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} It is evident that there is a close connection between the capacity to use language and the capacities covered by the verb" to think". Indeed, me writers have identified thinking with using words: Plato coined the saying, "In thinking the soul is talking to itself"; J.B. Watson reduced thinking to inhibited speech located in the minute movements or tensions of the physiological mechanisms involved in speaking; and although Ryle is careful to point out that there are many senses in which a person is said to think in which words are not in evidence, he has also said that saying something in a specific frame of mind is thinking a thought. Is thinking reducible to, or dependent upon, language habits? It would seem that many thinking situations are hardly distinguishable from the skilful use of language, although there are some others in which language is not involved. Thought cannot be simply identified with running language. It may be the case, of course, that the non-linguistic skills involved in thought can only be acquired and developed if the learner is able to use and understand language. However, this question is one which we cannot hope to answer in this book. Obviously being able to use language makes for a considerable development in all one's capacities but how precisely this comes about we cannot say. At the common-sense level it appears that there is often a distinction between thought and the words we employ to communicate with other people. We often have to struggle hard to find words to capture what our thinking has already grasped, and when we do find words we sometimes feel that they fail to do their job properly. Again when we report or describe our thinking to other people we do not merely report unspoken words and sentences. Such sentences do not always occur in thinking, and when they do they axe merged with vague imagery and the hint of unconscious or subliminal activities going on just out of range. Thinking, as it happens, is more like struggling, striving, or searching for something than it is like talking or reading. Words do play their part but they are rarely the only feature of thought. This observation is supported by the experiments of the Wurzburg psychologists reported in Chapter Eight who showed that intelligent adaptive responses can occur in problem solving situations without the use of either words or images of any kind; ",Set" and "determining tendencies" operate without the actual use of language in helping us to think purposefully and intelligently. Again the Study of speech disorders due to brain injury or disease suggest that patients can think without having adequate control over their language, some patients, for example, fail to find the names of objects presented to them and are unable to describe simple events which they witness; they even find it difficult to interpret long written notices. But they succeed in playing games of chess or draughts. They can use the concepts needed for chess playing or draughts playing but are unable to use many of the concepts in ordinary language. How they manage to do this we do not know. Yet animals such as Kohler's chimpan2ees can solve problems by working out strategies such as the invention of implements or Climbing aids when such animals have not language beyond a few warning cries. Intelligent or "insightful" behavior is not dependent in the case of monkeys on language skills: presumably human beings have various capacities for thinking situations which are likewise independent of language.

单选题Which of the following is closest in meaning to the phrase "feel out of place"?