单选题Anthropologists commonly distinguish three forms of marriage: monogamy, the marriage of one man to one woman, polygyny, the marriage of one man to two or more women, and polyandry, the marriage of one woman to two or more men. Polygyny and polyandry are often linked under the single term "polygamy" , a marriage of one individual to two or more spouses. Though there are many societies which permit, or even encourage, polygamous marriages, it does not follow, in such societies,that every married individual, or even that a majority of them, has more than one spouse, Quite the contrary is true, for in most, if not all, of so called polygamous societies monogamy is statistically the prevailing form. The reason for this is clear: the proportion of male to female births in any human society is roughly the same, and if this proportion is maintained among the sexually mature, a preponderance of plural marriages means that a considerable number of either men or women must remain unmarried. No society can maintain itself under such conditions; the emotional stresses would be too great to be survived. Accordingly, even where the cultural ideals do not prohibit plural marriages, these may occur on any notable scale only societies where for one reason or another, one sex markedly outnumbers the other. In short, monogamy not only prevails in most of the world's societies, either as the only approved form of marriage or as the only feasible form, but it may also prevail within a polygamous society where, very often, only a minority of the population can actually secure more than one spouse. In a polygynous household the husband must supply a house and garden for each of his wives. The wives live with him in turn, cooking and serving fur him during the period of his visit. The first wife takes precedence over the others. Polyandry is much rarer than polygyny. It is often the result of a disproportion in the ratio of men to women. In sum, polygamy is not, as so frequently indicated, universally a result of human immorality. It is simply not true, in this aspect of euhure as in many others, that people who follow patterns of culture deemed immoral in our society are thereby lacking in morality. Our ideal and compulsory pattern of marriage, which holds that monogamy is the only appropriate form of marriage, is not shared by all peoples, even by some of those who regularly practice monogamy. In a great many societies, monogamy is only one possible form of marriage, with polygyny or polyandry as perfectly possible, though less frequent, alternatives.

单选题Which of the following is not mentioned as an example of the social changes occurring in the United States after 1821)?______

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}} A factory that makes uranium fuel for nuclear reactors had a spill so bad it kept the plant closed for seven months last year and became one of only three events in all of 2006 serious enough for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to include in an annual report to Congress. After an investigation, the commission changed the terms of the factory's license and said the public had 20 days to request a hearing on the changes. But no member of the public ever did. In fact, no member of the public could find out about the changes. The document describing them, including the notice of hearing rights for anyone who felt adversely affected, was stamped "official use only," meaning that it was not publicly accessible. The agency would not even have told Congress which factory was involved were it not for the efforts of Gregory B. Jaczko, one of the five commissioners. Mr. Jaczko identified the company, Nuclear Fuel Services of Erwin, Tenn,, in a memorandum that became part of the public record. His memorandum said other public documents would allow an informed person to deduce that the factory belonged to Nuclear Fuel Services. Such secrecy by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now coming under attack by influential members of Congress. These lawmakers argue that the agency is withholding numerous documents about nuclear facilities in the name of national security, but that many withheld documents are not sensitive. The lawmakers say the agency must rebalance its penchant for secrecy with the public's right to participate in the licensing process and its right to know about potential hazards. The agency, the congressmen said, "has removed hundreds of in nocuous documents relating to the N. F. S. plant from public view." With a resurgence of nuclear plant construction expected after a 30-year hiatus, agency officials say frequently that they are trying to strike a balance between winning public confidence by regulating openly and protecting sensitive information. A commission spokesman, Scott Burnell, said the "official use only" designation was under review. As laid out by the commission's report to Congress and other sources, the event at the Nuclear Fuel Service factory was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid dribbling under a door and into a hallway. Workers had previously described a yellow liquid in a "glove box," a sealed container with gloves built into the sides to allow a technician to manipulate objects inside, but managers had decided it was ordinary uranium. In fact, it was highly enriched uranium that had been declared surplus from the weapons inventory of the Energy Department and sent to the plant to be diluted to a strength appropriate for a civilian reactor. If the material had gone critical, "it is likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute health effects or death," the commission said. Generally, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does describe nuclear incidents and changes in licenses. But in 2004, according to the committee's letter, the Office of Naval Reactors, part of the Energy Department, reached an agreement with the commission that any correspondence with Nuclear Fuel Services would be marked "official use only."

单选题September 11th. 2001 drew the transatlantic alliance together; but the mood did not last, and over the five years since it has pulled ever further apart. A recent poll for the German Marshall Fund shows that 57% of Europeans regard American leadership in world affairs as "undesirable". The Iraq war is mainly to blame. But there is another and more intractable reason for the growing division: God. Europeans worry that American foreign policy under George Bush is too influenced by religion. The "holy warriors" who hijacked the planes on September 11th reintroduced God into international affairs in the most dramatic of ways. It seems that George Bush is replying in kind, encouraging a clash of religions that could spell global catastrophe. Dominique Moisi, a special adviser at the French Institute for International Relations, argues that "the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening. We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare." Josef Braml, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, complains that in America "religious attitudes have more of an influence on political choices than in any other western democracy. " The notion that America is too influenced by religion is not confined to the elites. Three in five French people and nearly as many Dutch think that Americans are too religious--and that religion skews what should be secular decisions. Europeans who think that America is "too religious" are more inclined to anti-Americanism than their fellow countrymen. 38% of Britons have an unfavourable view of America, but that number rises to 50% among people who are wary of American religiosity. Is America engaged in a faith-based foreign policy? Religion certainly exerts a growing influence on its actions in the world, but in ways more subtle and complicated than Europeans imagine. It is true that America is undergoing a religious revival. "Hot" religions such as evangelical Protestantism and hardline Catholicism are growing rapidly while "cool" mainline versions of Christianity are declining. It is also true that the Republican Party is being reshaped by this revival. Self-identified evangelicals provided almost 40% of Mr. Bushes vote in 2004; if you add in other theological conservatives, such as Mormons and traditional Catholics, that number rises closer to 60%. All six top Republican leaders in the Senate have earned 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition. It is also true that Mr. Bush frequently uses religious rhetoric when talking of foreign affairs. On September 12th he was at it again, telling a group of conservative journalists that he sees the war on terror as "a confrontation between good and evil", and remarking, "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening" (in other words, an outbreak of Christian evangelical fervour, of the sort that has swept across America at least twice before). And Christian America overall is taking a bigger interest in foreign policy. New voices are being heard, such as Sam Brownback, a conservative senator from Kansas who has led the fight against genocide in Darfur, and Rick Warren, the author of a bestseller called "The Purpose-Driven Life", who is sending 2,000 missionaries to Rwanda. Finally, it is true that religious figures have done some pretty outrageous things. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Ch vez, the president of Venezuela. Lieutenant-General William "Jerry" Boykin, deputy under-secretary of defence for intelligence, toured the country telling Christian groups that radical Muslims hate America "because we're a Christian nation and the enemy is a guy named Satan". He often wore uniform.

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}} Few insects have inspired as much fear and hatred as the diminutive fire ants, less than half an inch long but living in colonies of more than 250,000 others. Everyone in the southern United States gets to know fire ants sooner or later by painful experience. Fire ants live in large earthen mounds and are true social insects--that means they have a caste system ( division of labor), with a specialized caste that lays eggs (queen) and a worker caste of sterile females. There are several reasons that they are considered pests. About 60% of people living in areas where fire ants occur are stung every year. Of these, about 1% have some degree of allergic reaction ( called anaphylaxis) to the sting. Their large mounds are unsightly and can damage mowing equipment. Fire ants sometimes enter electrical and mechanical equipment and can short out switches or chew through insulation. Finally. as fire ants move into new areas, they reduce diversity of native ants and prey on larger animals such as ground-nesting birds and turtles. Even though fire ants are pests in many circumstances, they can actually be beneficial in others. There is evidence that their predatory activities can reduce the numbers of some other important pests. In cotton, for example, they prey on important pests that eat cotton plants such as bollworms and budworms. In Louisiana sugarcane, an insect called the sugarcane borer used to be a very important pest before fire ants arrived and began preying on it. Fire ants also prey on ticks and fleas. Whether fire ants are considered pest or not depend on where they are found, but one thing is sure—we had best get used to living with them. Eradication attempts in the 1960s and 1970s failed for a number of reasons, and scientists generally agree that complete elimination of fire ants from the United States is not possible. A new, long-term approach to reducing fire ant populations Involves classical biological control. When fire ants were accidentally brought to the United States, most of their parasites and diseases were not. Classical biological control involves identifying parasites and diseases specific to fire ants in South America, testing them to be sure that they don ' t attack or infect native plants or animals and establishing them in the Introduced fire ant population In the United States. Since fire ants are about 5 to 7 times more abundant here than in South America, scientists hope to reduce their numbers using this approach.

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}} For years Internet merchants have poured millions of dollars into new technologies to make their sites easier to use. So why aren't online customers happier? Customer satisfaction levels have remained almost fiat through the last several years. The problem, according to Larry Freed, chief executive of a consulting and research firm called ForeSee Results, is not so much that consumers have ignored the many improvements made in recent years. Rather, be said, they still expect more from Internet shopping than it has delivered. "If we walk into a local store, we don't expect that experience to be better than it was a couple years ago," Mr. Freed said. "But we expect sites to be better. The bar goes up every year." In ForeSee's latest survey, released last month, just five e-commerce sites registered scores higher than 80 out of 100, and no site scored higher than 85. It was much the same story a year ago, when just five scored higher than 80, with no site surpassing 85. "Scores have inched up over time for the best e-commerce companies, but the overall numbers haven't moved drastically," Mr. Freed said. "At the same time though, if you don't do anything you see your scores drop steadily." That dynamic has been a challenge for online merchants and investors, who a decade ago envisioned. Internet stores as relatively inexpensive (and therefore extremely profitable) operations. Now some observers predict a future where online retailers will essentially adopt something like the QVC model, with sales staff pitching the site's merchandise with polished video presentations, produced in a high-tech television studio. QVC.com is evolving in that direction. The Web site, which sold more than $1 billion in merchandise in 2006, has for the last five years let visitors watch a live feed of the network's broadcast. But in recent months, QVC.com has also given visitors the chance to watch archives of entire shows, and in the coming months visitors will be able to find more video segments from recent shows, featuring individual products that remain in stock. Bob Myers, senior vice president of QVC.com, said the Web site's video salesmanship is especially effective when combined with detailed product information, customer reviews and multiple photographs. About eight months ago, for instance, a customer said that she could not determine the size of a handbag from the photographs on the site because she could not tell the height of the model who was holding it. Within two weeks the site tested and introduced a new system, showing the bags with women of three different heights. The results were immediate: women who saw the new photographs bought the bags at least 10 percent more frequently than those who had not. Still, Mr. Myers said, video is a critically important element to sales. "E-commerce started with television commerce," he said. "The sites who engage and entertain customers will be winning here in the near future." Such a prospect is not necessarily daunting to other e-commerce executives. Gordon Magee, head of Internet marketing for Drs. Foster & Smith, based in a Rhinelander, Wis., said a transition to video "will be seamless for us." The company, Mr. Magee said, has in recent weeks discussed putting some of its product on video "so customers could see a 360-degree view they don't have to manipulate themselves."

单选题At current online-ed rates, it is almost impossible for web publishers that create their own content to make money—just ask any of the two dozen, from Z.com to eCountries that have gone bust in the past month alone. The mason for the bloodbath is simple: advertisers are not willing m pay enough for web ads to support the cost of displaying them. To see why, consider a credit-card firm that wants to find customers online. Say it runs a campaign to display its banner ad to 2 million viewers. Using industry averages, one out of every 200 viewers can be expected to click on the ad: one out of every 100 of those will actually sign up for a credit card. Thus, the campaign would yield 100 new customers. Offline. the firm pays about $150 for each customer it acquires, through anything from direct mail to television ads. Using the same rate, it would therefore be willing to pay $15.000 for those 2 million online-ad views, or a cost-per-thousand- views (CPM) rate of $7.50. Now consider the economics of the website that is running those ads. It probably does not have its own ad sales team, so it is getting those credit-card ads from an advertising network such as DoubleClick. The network takes half the revenues, leaving the site with a CPM of $3.75. Imagine that the site is very successful, say among the top few hundred on the web. If so, it may be able to generate 10m page views 'a month. At $3.75 per thousand views, that means revenue of $37,500 a month. Take out hardware, software and bandwidth costs, and enough might be left to support two employees or so.This grim picture can be improved by selling more than one ad per page. but such clutter often comes at the cost of a lower rate of "click-throughs" and, eventually, even lower CPMs. The site can try to charge higher CPMs by providing more information about viewer demographics, to help advertisers target their ads, or by claiming that it has a sign that may justify a fee for brand-building advertisers. But advertisers are skeptical. The biggest web portals get their content almost for free—a mixture of material from other-sites and content created by viewers—and attract so much traffic that they can support huge organizations on low CPMs. But for most smaller websites, there is no way out. Those that cannot find revenue sources beyond advertising will either go bust or be forced to admit that their site is a non-profit enterprise. If truth-in-advertising rules were enforced, most dotcoms would be dotorgs.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The Tuscan town of Vinci, birthplace of Leonardo and home to a museum of his machines, should fittingly put on a show of the television-robot sculptures of Nam Jun Paik. This Korean-born American artist and the Renaissance master are kindred spirits: Leonardo saw humanistic potential in his scientific experiments, Mr Paik endeavors to harness media technology for artistic purposes. A pioneer of video art in the late 1960s, he treats television as a space for art images and as material for robots and interactive sculptures. Mr Paik was not alone. He and fellow artists picked on the video cameras because they offered an easy way to record their performance art. Now, to mark video art's coming of age, New York's Museum of Modern Art is looking back at their efforts in a film series called "The First Decade". It celebrates the early days of video by screening the archives of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world's leading distributors of video and new media art, founded 30 years ago. One of EAI's most famous alumni is Bill Viola. Part of the second generation of video artists, who emerged in the 1970s, Mr Viola experimented with video's expressive potential. His camera explores religious ritual and universal ideas. The Viola show at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin shows us moving-image frescoes that cover the gallery walls and envelop the viewer in all embracing cycles of life and death. One new star is a Californian, Doug Aitken, who took over London's Serpentine Gallery last October with an installation called "New Ocean". Some say Mr Aitken is to video what Jackson Pollock was to painting. He drips his images from floor to ceiling, creating sequences of rooms in which the space surrounds the viewer in hallucinatory images, of sound and light. At the Serpentine, Mr Aitken created a collage of moving images, on the theme of water's flow around the planet as a force of life. "I wanted to create a new topography in this work, a liquid image, to show a world that never stands still," he says. The boundary between the physical world and the world of images and information, he thinks, is blurring. The interplay of illusion and reality, sound and image, references to art history, politics, film and television in this art form that is barely 30 years old can make video art difficult to define. Many call it film-based or moving-image art to include artists who work with other cinematic media. At its best, the appeal of video art lies in its versatility, its power to capture the passing of time and on its ability to communicate both inside and outside gallery walls.

单选题As the baby-boomer generation contemplates the prospect of the Zimmer frame there has never been more interest in delaying the process of ageing. One consequence has been a(n) (1) rise in the popularity of brain-training games. But how (2) really is a daily dose of cryptic crossword? Robert Wilson, a neuropsychologist at Rush University in Chicago, and his colleagues decided to (3) out, (4) following a group of people without dementia. Participants were asked to (5) how frequently they engaged in cognitively (6) activities. The researchers were looking for such things as reading newspapers, books and magazines, (7) challenging games like chess, listening to the radio and watching television, and (8) museums. The good news, as they report in Neurology, is that (9) activity of this sort seems to slow the rate of (10) decline in those without cognitive (11) . The bad news is that in those who do then develop Alzheimer's disease it is associated with a more rapid (12) decline. What seems to be happening is that cognitive stimulation helps (13) the effect of the neurodegenerative lesions associated with dementia. It does not, (14) , make them go away. They continue to (15) , so that when the disease does eventually take (16) there are more of them around than there otherwise would be, which results in a more (17) cognitive fall off. That is not a message of despair, (18) , because the length of time someone suffers from dementia is thus (19) and their healthy life prolonged. So the message is, (20) on with the crosswords.

单选题We can learn from the last paragraph, zero growth

单选题Mourning the death of one of its own is perhaps the entertainment industry's most time-honored traditions. After an agonizing and prolonged decline, the long-suffering Vertically Integrated Media Conglomerate passed away. It's an idea that was born when Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications Corp. in 1989, to form Time Warner. It endured as the industry's prevailing business model for nearly a generation, spawning such clones and mongrel breeds as Viacom, News Corp and GE's NBC Universal. The vertically integrated media conglomerate was—or was supposed to be—many amazing things, giving a handful of companies unprecedented power over the media—and the chance to earn outsized profits in the process. But its defining characteristic was its sheer size, earning it a fitting nickname. Big Media. But the theory behind the strategy relied on more than size. Housed under one roof, a single Big Media entity would control the means of producing and distributing media content, from magazine and books to television shows and movies, from cartoons and theme parks to sports franchises and the cable networks that carry the games to recorded music labels and music publishers. In Time Warner's prototype of the model, it would control everything from the first letter of a Time magazine story or Warner Books novel to the last alphabet of the credits at the end of a Warner Brothers flick or HBO series based on the magazine story or the book division's fiction. For a time, Time Warner boasted a wide array of media assets. No more. On April 29, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes officially announced the death of Big Media. Having sliced off Warner Music Group a few years ago and Time Warner Cable this year, Bewkes notified the SEC that he intended to soon spin off AOL—its greatest expansionary effort to achieve media greatness, a move that proved lethal. And now, even the corporate namesake, the magazine company Time Inc., has a funereal atmosphere about it. The entertainment industry is only the latest in which the idea of vertical integration failed to live up to its promise. Consider the experiences of the auto industry. Henry Ford was a huge believer in the concept. His River Rouge plant, which once built the Model A, had its own electricity plant and its own mill for turning iron ore into steel; the vast majority of the components that went into its cars were made onsite. Over time, however, this soup-to-nuts strategy came to be seen as inefficient, companies could obtain better prices and more flexibility by dealing with a competing band of outside suppliers. Over time, once vertically-integrated companies like Ford and General Motors have spun off their internal supply division to form standalone companies, in an attempt to try to create the flexible, leaner supply chains created by Honda and Toyota. So what was Big Media's legacy? It's bad form, of course, to speak ill of the departed, but the model has left mostly a negative mark on the media landscape and corporate America.