单选题Centuries ago, man discovered that removing moisture from food helps to preserve it, and that the easiest way to do this is to expose the food to sun and wind. In this way the North American Indians produce pemmican, the Scandinavians make stockfish and the Arabs dry dates and apricot leather. All foods contain water-cabbage and other leaf vegetables contain as much as 93% water, potatoes and other root vegetables 80%, lean meat 75% and fish anything from 80% to 60% depending on how fatty it is. If this water is removed, the activity of the bacteria that cause food to deteriorate is checked. Fruit is sun-dried in Asia Minor, Greece, Spain and other Mediterranean countries, and also in California, South Africa and Australia. The methods used vary, but in general, the fruit is spread out on trays in drying yards in the hot sun. In order to prevent darkening, pears, peaches and apricots are exposed to the fumes of burning sulfur before drying. Plums, for making prunes, and certain varieties of grapes for making raisins and currants, are dipped in an alkaline solution in order to crack the skins of the fruit slightly and remove their wax coating, so increasing the rate of drying. Nowadays most foods are dried mechanically. The conventional method of such dehydration is to put food in chambers through which hot air is blown at temperatures of about 110℃ at entry to about 43℃ at exit. This is the usual method for drying such things as vegetables, minced meat, and fish. Liquids such as milk, coffee, tea, soups and eggs may be dried by pouring them over a heated horizontal steel cylinder or by spraying them into a chamber through which a current of hot air passes. In the first case, the dried material is scraped off the roller as a thin film which is then broken up into small, though still relatively coarse flakes;" in the second process it falls to the bottom of the chamber as a fine powder. Where recognizable pieces of meat and vegetables are required, as in soup, the ingredients are dried separately and then mixed. Dried foods take up less room and weigh less than the same food packed in cans or frozen, and they do not need to be stored in special conditions. For these reasons they are invaluable to climbers, explorers and soldiers in battle, who have little storage space. They are also popular with housewives because it takes so little time to cook them. Usually it is just a case of replacing the dried-out moisture with boiling water.

单选题According to Oswald Clint, Shell's chance of catching up is

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. There is growing interest in East Japan Railway Co. , one of the six companies, created out of the{{U}} (1) {{/U}}national railway system. In an industry lacking exciting growth{{U}} (2) {{/U}}, its plan to use real-estate assets in and around train stations{{U}} (3) {{/U}}is drawing interest. In a plan dubbed "Station Renaissance" that it{{U}} (4) {{/U}}in November, JR East said that it would{{U}} (5) {{/U}}using its commercial spaces for shops and restaurants, extending them to{{U}} (6) {{/U}}more suitable for the information age. It wants train stations as pick-up{{U}} (7) {{/U}}for such goods, as books, flowers and groceries purchased{{U}} (8) {{/U}}the Internet. In a country{{U}} (9) {{/U}}urbanites depend heavily on trains{{U}} (10) {{/U}}commuting, about 16 million people a day go to its train stations anyway, the company{{U}} (11) {{/U}}. So, picking up purchases at train stations spare{{U}} (12) {{/U}}extra travel and missed home deliveries. JR East already has been using its station{{U}} (13) {{/U}}stores for this purpose, but it plans to create{{U}} (14) {{/U}}spaces for the delivery of Internet goods. The company also plans to introduce{{U}} (15) {{/U}}cards--known in Japan as IC cards because they use integrated{{U}} (16) {{/U}}for holding information--{{U}} (17) {{/U}}train tickets and commuter passes{{U}} (18) {{/U}}the magnetic ones used today, integrating them into a single pass. This will save the company money, because{{U}} (19) {{/U}}for IC cards are much less expensive than magnetic systems. Increased use of IC cards should also{{U}} (20) {{/U}}the space needed for ticket vending.

单选题John Battelle is Silicon Valley's Bob Woodward. As one of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider. Certainly, Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, believe that it is safer to talk to Mr. Battelle than not to do so. The result is a highly readable account of Google's astonishing rise--the steepest in corporate history--from its origins in Stanford University to its controversial stockmarket debut and its current struggle to become a grown-up company while staying true to its youthfully brash motto, "Don't be evil. " Mr. Battelle makes the reader warm to Google's ruling triumvirate--their cleverness and their good intentions--and fear for their future as they take on the world. Google is one of the most interesting companies around at the moment. It has a decent shot at displacing Microsoft as the next great near-monopoly of the information age. Its ambition--to organise all the world's information, not just the information on the world wide web--is epic, and its commercial power is frightening. Beyond this, Google is interesting for the same reason that secretive dictatorships and Hollywood celebrities are interesting--for being opaque, colourful and, simply, itself. The book disappoints only when Mr. Battelle begins trying to explain the wider relevance of internet search and its possible future development. There is a lot to say on this subject, but Mr. Battelle is hurried and overly chatty, producing laundry lists of geeky concepts without really having thought any of them through properly. This is not a fatal flaw. Read only the middle chapters, and you have a great book.

单选题The sentence that "your money was so old" in the second paragraph means______

单选题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.

单选题Wine buffs are like art collectors. Few can tell the difference between a well-made fake and the real thing. Yet whereas counterfeit art has been around for centuries, wine forgery is relatively new. It started in the late 1970s when the prices of the best wines—especially those from Bordeaux—shot up. Today, with demand from China fuelling a remarkable boom, counterfeiting is rife. By some estimates 5% of fine wines sold at auction or on the secondary market are not what they claim to be on the label. The simplest technique is to slap the label of a 1982 Chàteau Lafite (one of the most prized recent vintages) onto a bottle of 1975 Lafite (a less divine year). Another trick is to bribe the sommelier of a fancy restaurant to pass on empty bottles that once held expensive wine, along with the corks. These can be refilled with cheaper wine, recorked and resealed. Empty Lafite and Latour bottles are sold on eBay for several hundred euros. The margins are fruity. A great wine may cost hundreds of times more than a merely excellent one. Small wonder that oenophiles are growing more vigilant. Bill Koch, an energy tycoon and avid wine collector, currently has five lawsuits pending against merchants, auctioneers and other collectors. His grape-related gripes began in 2006, when he filed a complaint against a German wine dealer who sold bottles of Lafite he claimed had once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. The case is unresolved. "There is a code of silence in the industry," says Mr. Koch, who owns 43,000 bottles of wine and estimates that he has spent $4m～5m on fakes. Some collectors are too proud to admit that they have been duped. Others fear sullying a vintage's reputation and thereby reducing the value of their own collections. So instead of speaking out, "they dump their fakes into auctions or sell them to other private collectors," says Mr. Koch. Wine merchants and auction houses say they are doing everything they can to filter out the fakes. Simon Berry, the chairman of Berry Brothers & Rudd, a British wine merchant, says his firm never buys wines from before 2000 unless they come from its own cellars. (Berry Brothers stores nearly 4m bottles on behalf of its customers. ) Christie's, an auctioneer, says all the wines it auctions are inspected three times by different people, using detailed checklists for condition and authenticity. Fear of fakery has not stopped the boom. But the wines that win the best prices at auction are those whose provenance is certain. In May, Christie's sold an impériale (six-litre bottle) of 1961 Latour for $216,000 in Hong Kong. It came directly from the cellars of Chàteau Latour.

单选题According to the text what is the best for both parents and children?______

单选题"I love Microsoft and Microsoft did not lose me," protested Robert Scoble, a little too loudly, on his blog last week, in a bid to end feverish speculation in the blogosphere about why, exactly, he had decided to leave Microsoft. The software giant's "technical evangelist", Mr. Scoble has become the best-known example of a corporate blogger. On his blog, called Scobleizer, which he started in 2000, he writes about Microsoft's products, and has sometimes criticised them fiercely—thereby both establishing his credibility and, by its willingness to tolerate him, helping to humanise his employer. As blogging's influence has grown, so bas Mr. Scoble's—both inside and outside Microsoft. Last year, after he blogged against Microsoft's decision to abandon support for a law prohibiting discrimination against gays, the company's managers backed down. He helped write a book, Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers, published in January, that has become essential reading for any boss trying to define a new-media strategy for his business. So why leave? Mr. Scoble has denied several of the theories circulating in the blogosphere, including that he had become fed up with having his expenses challenged or with sharing an office; that Microsoft challenged his views too often; that he had become, frustrated; and that the firm had not tried hard enough to keep him. Still, his friend Dave Winer, another blogger, described Microsoft as a "stifling organisation" before observing that "when he finally decided to leave, it's as if a huge weight came off him, and all of a sudden, the old Scoble is back." He views Mr. Scoble's departure as evidence that Microsoft has been unable to move with the times: "I'm glad to see my old friend didn't go down with the ship." Another blogger says that his departure shows the "end of honest blogging." The real reason may be less sinister—though troubling for the growing number of employers encouraging their employees to biog. Blogging allows staff to build a personal brand separate from that of their firm; if they are good at it, and build up a readership, that brand may be more valuable to them elsewhere. Mr. Scoble is off to join PodTech. net, a rising star in video podcasting, which is now far more fashionable than blogging and potentially far more lucrative. It seems that Mr. Scoble is most impressed by Rocketboom, one of whose founders, Amanda Congdon, is said to be drawing 300000 viewers a day to her videoblog, and is about to start charging advertisers $85000 a week—almost as much, Mr. Scoble is reported as saying, "as I made in an entire year working at Microsoft./