单选题The data accumulated was obtained through______

单选题Today, dying young is ______.

单选题Just recently the trustees of Social Security and Medicare issued their annual reports on the programs' futures. Here's one startling fact: By 2030 the projected costs of Social Security and Medicare could easily consume—via higher taxes—a third of workers' future wage and salary increases. We're mortgaging workers' future pay gains for baby boomers' retirement benefits. This matters because Social Security and Medicare are pay-as-you-go programs. Current taxpayers pay current benefits. Future taxpayers will pay future benefits. Baby boomers' retirement benefits will come mostly from their children and grandchildren, who will be tomorrow's workers. Consequently, baby boomers' children and grandchildren face massive tax increases. Social Security and Medicare spending now equals 14 percent of wage and salary income, reports Elizabeth Bell, a research assistant to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, Washington, D.C.. Of course, payroll taxes don't cover all the costs of Social Security and Medicare. Still, these figures provide a crude indicator of the economic burden, because costs are imposed heavily on workers via some tax, government borrowing and cuts in other government programs. It can be argued that the costs are bearable. The wage gains in the trustees' reports could prove too pessimistic. Like all forecasts, they're subject to errors. Even if they come true, they assume that tomorrow's wages will be higher than today's. Productivity increases; wages rise. In 2030, under the trustees' "intermediate" assumptions, workers' before-tax incomes would be about a third higher than now, says Tom Saving of Texas A to limit future spending by curbing retirement benefits for the better-off; to keep people in the productive economy longer by encouraging jobs that mix "work" and "retirement".

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} By the mid-sixties, blue jeans were an essential part of the wardrobe of those with a commitment to social struggle. In the American Deep South, black farmers and grandchildren of slaves still segregated from whites, continued to wear jeans in their mid-nineteenth-century sense; but now they were joined by college students-black and white-in a battle to overturn deeply embedded race hatred. The clothes of the workers became a sacred bond between them. The clothing of toil came to signify the dignity of struggle. In the student rebellion and the antiwar movement that followed, blue jeans and work shirts provided a contrast to the uniforms of the dominant culture. Jeans were the opposite of high fashion, the opposite of the suit or military uniform. With the rise of the women's movement in the late 1960s, the political significance of dress became increasingly explicit; Rejecting orthodox sex roles, blue jeans were a woman's weapon against uncomfortable popular fashions and the view that women should be passive. This was the cloth of action; the cloth of labor became the badge of freedom. If blue jeans were for rebels in the 1960s and early 1970s, by the 1980s they had become a foundation of fashion-available in a variety of colors, textures, fabrics, and fit. These simple pants have made the long journey "from workers' clothes to cultural revolt to status symbol." On television, in magazine advertising, on the sides of buildings and buses, jeans call out to us. Their humble past is obscured; practical roots arc incorporated into a new aesthetic. Jeans are now the universal symbol of the individual and Western democracy. They are the costume of liberated women, with a fit tight enough to restrict like the harness of old-but with the look of freedom and motion. In blue jeans, fashion reveals itself as a complex world of history and change. Yet looking at fashions, in and of themselves, reveals situations that often defy understanding. Our ability to understand a specific fashion-the current one of jeans, for example-shows us that as we try to make sense of it, our confusion intensifies. It is a fashion whose very essence is contradiction and confusion. To pursue the goal of understanding is to move beyond the actual cloth itself, toward the more general phenomenon of fashion and the world in which it has risen to importance. Exploring the role of fashion within the social and political history of industrial America helps to reveal the parameters and possibilities of American society. The ultimate question is whether the development of images of rebellion into mass-produced fashions has actually resulted in social change.

单选题When Rupert Murdoch sees beams of light in the American advertising market, it is not necessarily time to reach for the sunglasses. Last October, when the impact of September 11th was only beginning to tell, the boss of NASCAR, a media group, had already identified " strong rays of sunshine". With ad sales still languishing, Mr. Murdoch declared last month that " there are some hints of a modest upswing in tile US advertising market". His early optimism turned out to be misplaced. Now, however, other industry observers are beginning to agree with him. Advertising usually exaggerates the economic cycle, falling sharply and early in a downturn, and rebounding strongly once the economy has begun to recover. This is because most managers prefer to trim their ad budgets rather than their payrolls, and restore such spending only once they feel sure that things are looking up. Last year, America"s ad market shrank by 9. 8% , according to CMIR, a research firm. Although ad spending has not yet recovered across all media, some analysts now expect overall ad spending to start to grow in the third quarter. The signs of improvement are patchy, however. Ad spending on radio and television seems to be inching up—advertising on American National Radio was up 2% in January on the same period last year, according to Aegis—while spending on magazines and newspapers is still weak. Even within any one market, there are huge differences; just pick up a copy of one of the now-slimline high-teeh magazines that once bulged with ads, and compare it with the hefty celebrity or women"s titles. Advertisers in some categories, such as the travel industry, are still reluctant to buy space or airtime, while others, such as the car and movie businesses, have been bolder. The winter Olympics, held last month in Salt Lake City, has also distorted the spending on broadcast advertising in the first quarter. Nonetheless, there is an underlying pattern. One measure is the booking of ad spots for national brands on local television. By early March, according to Mr. Westerfield"s analysis, such bookings were growing fast across eight out of the top ten advertising sectors, led by the financial and motor industries. UBS Warburg now expects the " upfront" market, which starts in May when advertisers book advance ad spots on the TV networks for the new season in September, to be up 4% on last year. On some estimates, even online advertising could pick up by the end of the year.

单选题Text 3 The marvelous telephone and television network that has now enmeshed the whole world, making all men neighbors, cannot be extended into space. It will never be possible to converse with anyone on another planet. Even with today's radio equipment, the messages will take minutes—sometimes hours—on their journey, because radio and light waves travel at the same limited speed of 186,000 miles a second. Twenty years from now you will be able to listen to a friend on Mars, but the words you hear will have left his mouth at least three minutes earlier, and your reply will take a corresponding time to reach him. In such circumstances, an exchange of verbal messages is possible—but not a conversation. To a culture which has come to take instantaneous communication for granted, as part of the very structure of civilized life, this "time barrier" may have a profound psychological impact. It will be a perpetual reminder of universal laws and limitations against which not all our technology can ever prevail. For it seems as certain as anything can be that no signal—still less any material object—can ever travel faster than light. The velocity of light is the ultimate speed limit, being part of the very structure of space and time. Within the narrow confines of the solar system, it will not handicap us too severely. At the worst, these will amount to twenty hours—the time it takes a radio signal to span the orbit of Pluto, the outer-most planet. It is when we move out beyond the confines of the solar system that we come face to lace with an altogether new order of cosmic reality. Even today, many otherwise educated men—like those savages who can count to three but lump together all numbers beyond four—cannot grasp the profound distinction between solar and stellar space. The first is the space enclosing our neighbouring worlds, the planets; the second is that which embraces those distant suns, the stars, and it is literally millions of times greater. There is no such abrupt change of scale in the terrestrial affairs. Many conservative scientists, appalled by these cosmic gulfs, have denied that they can ever be crossed. Some people never learn; those who sixty years ago scoffed at the possibility of flight, and ten years ago laughed at the idea of travel to the planets, are now quite sure that the stars will always be beyond our reach. And again they are wrong, for they have failed to grasp the great lesson of our age—that if something is possible in theory, and no fundamental scientific laws oppose its realization, then sooner or later it will be achieved. One day we shall discover a really efficient means of propelling our space vehicles. Every technical device is always developed to its limit and the ultimate speed for spaceships is the velocity of light. They will never reach that goal, but they will get very near it. And then the nearest star will be less than five years' voyaging from the earth.

单选题 Karl Von Linne (or Linnaeus, as he is widely known) was a Swedish biologist who devised the system of Latinised scientific names for living things that biologists use to this day. When he came to{{U}} (1) {{/U}}people into his system, he put them into a group called Homo--and Linne's hairless fellow humans are still known biologically as Homo sapiens. {{U}}(2) {{/U}}the group originally had a second member, Homo troglodytes. It lived in Africa, and the pictures show it to be covered{{U}} (3) {{/U}}hair. Modern{{U}} (4) {{/U}}are not as generous as Linne in welcoming other species into Man's lofty {{U}}(5) {{/U}}, and the chimpanzee is now referred to{{U}} (6) {{/U}}Pan troglodytes. But Pan or Homo, there is no{{U}} (7) {{/U}}that chimps are humans' nearest living relatives, and that if the secrets of what makes humanity special are ever to be{{U}} (8) {{/U}}, understanding why chimps are not people, nor people chimps, is a crucial part of the process. That, in turn, means looking at the DNA of the two species,{{U}} (9) {{/U}}it is here that the{{U}} (10) {{/U}}must originate. One half of the puzzle has been{{U}} (11) {{/U}}for several years: the human genome was published in 2001. The second has now been added, with the announcement in this week's Nature{{U}} (12) {{/U}}the chimpanzee genome has been sequenced as well. For those expecting {{U}}(13) {{/U}}answers to age-old questions{{U}} (14) {{/U}}, the publication of the chimp genome may be something of an{{U}} (15) {{/U}}. There are no immediately obvious genes-present in one, but not the other-that account for such characteristic human{{U}} (16) {{/U}}as intelligence or even hairlessness. And{{U}} (17) {{/U}}there is a gene connected with language, known as FOXP2, it had already been discovered. But although the preliminary comparison of the two genomes {{U}}(18) {{/U}}by the members of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, the multinational team that generated the sequence, did not{{U}} (19) {{/U}}, any obvious nuggets of genetic gold, it does at least show where to look for{{U}} (20) {{/U}}.

单选题King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife, stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of Antichrist the King --"that bottled spider, that poisonous bunchbacked toad." Anyway, that was Shakespeare's version. Shakespeare did what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid, articulate, organized dream-repeatable nightly. He put the crouchback onstage, and sold tickets. And who would say that the real Richard known to family and friends was not identical to Shakespeare's memorably loathsome creation? The actual Richard went dimming into the past and vanished. When all the eye-witnesses are gone, the artist's imagination begins to twist. Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in Oliver Stone's JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor historians who wanted to blacken Richard's name. Several centuries passed before other historians began to write about Richard's virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art. JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king." What are the rules of Stone's game? Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer? Propagandist? Documentary filmmaker? Historian? Journalist? Fantasist? Sensationalist? Crazy conspiracy monger? Lone hero crusading for the truth against a corrupt Establishment? Answer: some of the above. The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn't it be absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of 1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy's assassination from Oliver Stone's report of it? But worse things have happened--including, perhaps, the Warren Commission report? Stone uses a suspect, mixed art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what? Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy's imagining of it in War and Peace. Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries--although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} A multinational corporation is a corporate enterprise, which though headquartered in one country, conducts its operations through branches that it owns or controls around the world. The organizations, mostly based in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, have become major actors on the international stage, for some of them are wealthier than many of the countries they operate in. The less developed countries often welcome the multinationals because they are a source of investment and jobs. Yet their presence has its drawbacks, for these organizations soon develop immense political and economic influence in the host countries. Development becomes concentrated in a few industries that are oriented to the needs of the outsiders; profits are frequently exported rather than reinvested; and local benefits go mainly to a small ruling group whose interests are tied to those of the foreigners rather than to those of their own people. The effect is to further increase export dependency and to limit the less developed countries' control of their own economies. It seems that both the modernization and world-system approaches may be valid in certain respects. The modernization model does help us make sense of the historical fact of industrialization and of the various internal adjustments that societies undergo during this process. The world-system model reminds us that countries do not develop in isolation. They do so in a context of fierce international political and economic competition, a competition whose outcome favors the stronger parties. Today, the less developed countries are struggling to achieve in the course of a few years the material advantages that the older industrialized nations have taken generations to gain. The result is often a tug-of-war between the forces of modernization and the sentiments of tradition, with serious social disturbance as the result. The responses have taken many different forms: military overthrow by army officers determined to impose social order; fundamentalist religious movements urging a return to absolute moralities and certainties of the past; nationalism as a new ideology to unite the people for the challenge of modernization. And sometimes social change takes place in a way that is not evolutionary, but revolutionary.

单选题Which of the following is strongly against cloning research?

单选题Taeko Mizuguchi represents the kind of women who are

单选题Why Miran was not allowed to leave the Charles de Gaulle Airport?

单选题A study of art history might be a good way to learn more about a culture than that is possible to learn in general history classes. Most (1) history courses concentrate on politics, economics, and war. (2) , art history (3) on much more than this because art reflects not only the political values of a people, but also religious (4) , emotions, and psychology. (5) , information about the daily activities of our own can be provided by art. In short, art expresses the (6) qualities of a time and a place, and a study of it clearly offers us a deeper understanding than what can be found in most history books. In history books, objective information about the political life of a country is (7) ; that is, facts about political are given, but (8) are not expressed. Art, on the other hand, is (9) : it reflects emotions and impressions. The great Spanish painter Francisco Goya severely criticized the Spanish government for its (10) of power over people. Over a hundred years later, symbolic (11) were used in Pablo Picasso's Guemica to express the (12) of War. (13) , on another continent, the powerful paintings of Diego Rivera depicted these Mexican artists' concealed (14) and sadness about social problems. In the same way, art can (15) a culture's religious beliefs. For hundreds of years in Europe, religious art was (16) the only type of art that existed. Churches and other religious buildings were filled with paintings that depicted people and stories from the Bible. (17) most people couldn't read, they could still understand biblical stories in the pictures on church walls. (18) , one of the main characteristics of art in the Middle East was (and still is) its (19) of human and animal images. This reflects the Islamic belief that statues are (20) .

单选题In 2010, a federal judge shook America"s biotech industry to its core. Companies had won patents for isolated DNA for decades—by 2005 some 20% of human genes were patented. But in March 2010 a judge ruled that genes were unpatentable. Executives were violently agitated. The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), a trade group, assured members that this was just a "preliminary step" in a longer battle. On July 29th they were relieved, at least temporarily. A federal appeals court overturned the prior decision, ruling that Muriad Genetics could indeed hold patents to two genes that help forecast a woman"s risk of breast cancer. The chief executive of Mytiad, a company in Utah, said the ruling was a blessing to firms and patients alike. But as companies continue their attempts at personalised medicine, the courts will remain rather busy. The Myriad case itself is probably not over. Critics make three main arguments against gene patents: a gene is a product of nature, so it may not be patented; gene patents suppress innovation rather than reward it; and patents" monopolies restrict access to genetic tests such as Myriad"s. A growing number seem to agree. Last year a federal task-force urged reform for patents related to genetic tests. In October the Department of Justice filed a brief in the Myriad case, arguing that an isolated DNA molecule "is no less a product of nature...than are cotton fibres that have been separated from cotton seeds." Despite the appeals court"s decision, big questions remain unanswered. For example, it is unclear whether the sequencing of a whole genome violates the patents of individual genes within it. The case may yet reach the Supreme Court. As the industry advances, however, other suits may have an even greater impact. Companies are unlikely to file many more patents for human DNA molecules—most are already patented or in the public do-main. Firms are now studying how genes interact, looking for correlations that might be used to determine the causes of disease or predict a drug"s efficacy. Companies are eager to win patents for "connecting the dots," explains Hans Sauer, a lawyer for the BIO. Their success may be determined by a suit related to this issue, brought by the Mayo Clinic, which the Supreme Court will hear in its next term. The BIO recently held a convention which included sessions to coach lawyer on the shifting landscape for patents. Each meeting was packed .

单选题Stelios expands his business following the key principle that

单选题Government officials reported three new cases of mad cow, bringing the total so far this year to 99. Last year, France recorded just 31 cases of the mad cow disease. The rising numbers are in part 1 a new testing program that focuses on cows that are most 2 . That program has 3 39 cases. But still 60 new cases were identified in the usual way, 4 were found in 1999. Many scientists 5 that this year, five years after safety precautions were 6 , the number of cases would be 7 . The rise in cases has 8 some scientists to question whether the disease can be transmitted in ways not yet understood. Scientists are still 9 the disease, first recognized in cows in 1986. It appears that it is not caused by a bacteria, virus or fungus, but 10 infectious particles called prion, perhaps 11 a virus or other agent. The disease kills cells in the brain, 12 it spongy and full of holes. France has taken more steps to 13 safety than most European countries, 14 refusing to take English beef 15 the European Union. But some scientists believe that France has not been 16 in imposing the ban on feed that 17 animal parts. Some French officials hope that the sudden interest in mad cow disease will mean that French consumers will become educated about it, thereby recognizing that French beef is actually 18 controlled. Every cow is given a passport at birth, and extensive information about its parentage and 19 it was raised must be 20 to any slaughterhouse. When a diseased animal is found, the entire herd is destroyed.