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单选题It can be inferred from the passage that the author would consider which of the following to be an indication of a fundamental alteration in the conditions of women' s work?
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单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}}
You may fall prey to a nonviolent but
frightening and fast-growing crime: identity theft. It happens to at least 500,
000 new victims each year, according to government figures. And it happens very
easily because every identification number you have Social Security, credit
card, driver's license, telephone- "is a key that unlocks some storage of money
or goods," says a fraud program manager of the US Postal Service. "So if you
throw away your credit card receipt and I get it and use the number on it, I'm
not becoming you, but to the credit card company I've become your
account." One major problem, experts say, is that the Social
Security Number (SSN) — originally meant only for retirement benefit and tax
purposes — has become the universal way to identify people. It is used as
identification by the military, colleges and in billions of commercial
transactions. Yet a shrewd thief can easily snatch your SSN, not
only by stealing your wallet, but also by taking mail from your box, going
through your trash for discarded receipts and bills or asking for it over the
phone on some pretext. Using your SSN, the thief applies for a
credit card in your name, asking that it be sent to a different address than
yours, and uses it for multiple purchases. A couple of months later the credit
card company, or its debt collection agency, presses you for payment.
You don't have to pay the debt, but you must clean up your damaged credit
record. That means getting a police report and copy of the erroneous contract,
and then using them to clear the fraud from your credit report, which is held by
a credit bureau. Each step can require a huge amount of effort.
In the Collins' case, the clearance of the erroneous charges from their
record required three years of poring over records and $6, 000 in solicitor's
fees. In the meantime, they were denied a loan to build a vacation home, forced
to pay cash for a new heating and cooling system, hounded by debt collectors,
and embarrassed by the spectacle of having their home watched by investigators
looking for the missing car. Of course, thousands of people are
caught and prosecuted for identity theft. But it was only last year that
Congress made identity theft itself a federal crime. That law set up a special
government office to help victims regain their lost credit and to streamline
police efforts by tracking cases on a national scale. Consumer
advocates say this may help but will not address the basic problems, which, they
believe, are causing the outbreak in identity theft: industry's rush to attract
more customers by issuing instant credit, inadequate checking of identity, and
too few legal protections for consumers personal
information.
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单选题Once upon a time, innovation at Procter today, they could even be in the majority. "
As Procter & Gamble has found, the United States is no longer an isolated market. Americans are more open than ever before to buying foreign-made products and to selling U S-made products overseas.
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单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}}
Elections often tell you more about
what people are against than what they are for. So it is with the European
ones that took place last week in all 25 European Union member countries.
These elections, widely trumpeted as the world's biggest-ever
multinational democratic vote, were fought for the most part as 25 separate
national contests, which makes it tricky to pick out many common themes.
But the strongest are undoubtedly negative. Europe's voters are angry and
disillusioned-and they have demonstrated their anger and disillusion in three
main ways. The most obvious was by abstaining. The
average overall turnout was just over 45%, by some margin the lowest ever
recorded for elections to the European Parliament. And that average
disguises some big variations: Italy, for example, notched up over 70%, but
Sweden managed only 37%. Most depressing of all, at least to believers in
the European project, was the extremely low vote in many of the new member
countries from central Europe, which accounted for the whole of the fall in
turnout since 1999. In the biggest, Poland, only just over a fifth of the
electorate turned out to vote. Only a year ago, central Europeans voted in
large numbers to join the EU, which they did on May 1st. That they
abstained in such large numbers in the European elections points to early
disillusion with the European Union-as well as to a widespread feeling, shared
in the old member countries as well, that the European Parliament does not
matter. Disillusion with Europe was also a big factor in
the second way in which voters protested, which was by supporting a ragbag of
populist, nationalist and explicitly anti-EU parties. These ranged from
the 16% who backed the UK Independence Party, whose declared policy is to
withdraw from the EU and whose leaders see their mission as "wrecking" the
European Parliament, to the 14% who voted for Sweden's Junelist, and the 27% of
Poles who backed one of two anti-EU parties, the League of Catholic Families and
Selfdefence. These results have returned many more Eurosceptics and
trouble-makers to the parliament: on some measures, over a quarter of the new
MEPS will belong to the "awkward squad". That is not a bad thing,
however, for it will make the 'parliament more representative of European public
opinion. But it is the third target of European voters' ire
that is perhaps the most immediately significant, the fact that, in many EU
countries, old and new, they chose to vote heavily against their own
governments. This anti-incumbent vote was strong almost everywhere, but it
was most pronounced in Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Sweden.
The leaders of all the four biggest European Union countries, Tony Blair
in Britain, Jacques Chirac in France, Gerhard Schroder in Germany and Silvio
Berlusconi in Italy, were each given a bloody nose by their voters.
The big question now is how Europe's leaders should respond to this.
By a sublime (or terrible) coincidence, soon after the elections, and just
as The Economist was going to press, they were gathering in Brussels for a
crucial summit, at which they are due to agree a new constitutional treaty for
the EU and to select a new president for the European Commissi6n. Going
into the meeting, most EU heads of government seemed determined to press ahead
with this agenda regardless of the European elections--even though the
atmosphere after the results may make it harder for them to strike deals.
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With Airbus' giant A380 airliner about
to take to the skies, you might think planes could not get much bigger-and you
would be right. For a given design, it turns{{U}} (1) {{/U}}, there
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engineers{{U}} (5) {{/U}}University College London have devised all
innovative way to customise and control the{{U}} (6) {{/U}}of a material
throughout its three-dimensional structure. In the{{U}} (7)
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the physical properties of every cubic millimetre of a structure.
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commonly used by engineers,{{U}} (12) {{/U}}a virtual prototype of the
object. The software models the stresses and strains that the object will need
to{{U}} (13) {{/U}}throughout its structure. Using this information it
is then{{U}} (14) {{/U}}to calculate the precise forces acting on
millions of smaller subsections of the structure.{{U}} (15) {{/U}}of
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the most{{U}} (20) {{/U}}design for each
subsection.
单选题What does the author mean by "turn it into riches" ( Line I 1, Paragraph 1 )?
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单选题In which of the following years did the poor people constitute the largest proportion of the American population?
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单选题It can be inferred from the text that there exists a tendency to
单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}}
The Net success of "Lazy Sunday"
represents a defining moment for the film and television business. Advances in
digital video and broadband have vastly lowered the cost of production and
distribution. Filmmakers are now following the path blazed by bloggers and
musicians, cheaply creating and uploading their work to the Web. If it appeals
to any of the Net's niches, millions of users will pass along their films
through e-mail, downloads or links. It's the dawn of the democratization of the
TV and film business--even unknown personalities are being propelled by the
enthusiasm of their fans into pop-culture prominence, sometimes without even
traditional intermediaries like talent agents or film festivals.
"This is like bypass surgery,' says Dan Harmon, a filmmaker whose monthly
L. A. -based film club and Web site, Channel 101, lets members submit short
videos, such as the recent 70s' music mockumentary "Yacht Rock," and vote on
which they like best. "Finally we have a new golden age where the artist has a
direct connection to the audience;" The directors behind "Lazy
Sunday" embody the phenomenon. When the shaggy-haired Samberg, 27, graduated
from NYU Film School in 2001, he faced the conventional challenge or, crashing
the gates Of Hollywood. With his two childhood friends Akiva Schaffer and Jorma
Taccone, he came up with an unconventional solution: they started recording
music parodies and comic videos, and posting them to their Web site,
TheLonelyisland. com. The material got the attention of
producers at the old ABC sitcom "Spin City", where Samberg and Taccone worked as
low-level assistants; the producers sent a compilation to a talent agency. The
friends got an agent, made a couple of pilot TV sketch shows for Comedy Central
and Fox, featuring themselves hamming it up in nearly all the roles, and wrote
jokes for the MTV Movie Awards. Even when the networks passed on their pilots,
Samberg and his friends simply posted the episodes online and their fan base--at
40,000 unique visitors a month earlier this year--grew larger. Last August,
Samberg joined the "SNL" cast, and Schaffer and Taccone became writers. Now they
share an office in Rockefeller Center and "are a little too cute for everyone,"
Samberg says, "We are friends living our dream." Short, funny
videos like "Lazy Sunday" happen to translate online, but not everything works
as well. Bite-size films are more practical than longer ones; comedy plays
better than drama. But almost everything is worth trying, since the tools
to create and post video are now so cheap, and ad hoc audiences can form around
any sensibility, however eccentric.
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单选题Which of the following is the most desirable site where cosmic neutrinos can be easily detected? [A] Labs with massive detector. [B] Enclosed volcanic caves. [C] Vacuum cabins. [D] Shallow salt lake.
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