单选题As used the first line, the phrase "talk back" means ______.

单选题Some time between digesting Christmas dinner and putting your head back down to work, spare a thought or two for the cranberry. It is, of course, a (1) of Christmas: merry bright red, bittersweetly delicious with turkey and the very devil to get out of the tablecloth (2) spilled. But the cranberry is also a symbol of the modern food industry-and in the tale of its (3) from colonial curiosity to business-school case study (4) a deeper understanding of the opportunities and (5) of modern eating. The fastest growing part of today's cranberry market is for cranberries that do not taste like cranberries. Ocean Spray's "flavoured fruit pieces" (FFPS, to the trade) taste like orange, cherry, raspberry or any (6) of other fruits. They are in fact cranberries. Why make a cranberry taste like an orange? Mostly because it is a (7) little fruit: FFPS have a shelf-life of two years. Better (8) , they keep a chewy texture (9) baked, unlike the fruits whose flavours they mimic, which turn to (10) . The dynamic that has brought the cranberry to this point is (11) to the dynamic behind most mass-produced goods. Growing (12) provided the (13) to create cheaper and more reliable supply. Cheaper and more reliable supply, (14) , created incentives to find new markets, which increased demand. Thus was the (15) kept churning. The cranberry is one of only three fruits native (16) North America, growing wild from Maine to North Carolina. (The others are the Concord grape and the blueberry). The American Indians had several names for cranberries, many (17) the words for "bitter" or, more (18) , "noisy". They ate the berries mostly (19) pemmican, but also used them for dye and medicine. And they introduced them to the white settlers--at the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621, it is said. The settlers promptly renamed this delicacy the "crane berry", (20) the pointy pink blossoms of tile cranberry look a bit like the head of the Sandhill crane.

单选题James Q. Wilson supports Mary Eberstadt's new book because

单选题Electronics are being recycled in record numbers as more states require it and more companies collect and even pay for discarded items, but the gains come with controversy. Some environmentalists complain that recycling is not keeping pace with electronics sales. Some say e-waste is being dumped in developing countries, where toxic materials such as lead and mercury can leach from landfills into groundwater. "It is a success story, but we'd like to see it get more successful" to keep up with the electronics boom, says Janette Petersen of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The amount of recycled items more than doubled from 1999 to 2007, the most recent year for which the EPA has figures. But as a percentage of all electronics, it increased less, from 15% to 18%. "The demand for electronics recycling has been growing," partly because of the switch last year to digital TV, says Jennifer Berry of Earth911. corn, a private group that keeps a database of recyclers. Last year, she says 31% of inquiries involved electronics, primarily TVs, batteries and computers. Public and private efforts are expanding. Vermont became the 21st state last month to enact a law that requires e-waste recycling. Twenty-six companies--including Dell, Hewlett Packard, ATT and Verizon--have partnered with the EPA on the Plug-In to eCycling program to promote electronics recycling since its launch in 2003. Companies such as Gazelle. corn pay for used gadgets such as iPods, which they resell or recycle. Best Buy and other stores are collecting more e-waste. Target announced last month that it put bins in every store to accept cellphones, MP3 players and ink cartridges. Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based non-profit organization that aims to stop toxic exports, worries that some American companies dump e-waste in Africa to save money. "People are trying to look green, but they're not telling you where it (waste) is going," he says. "You can't turn over your TV to just any recycler. " He says it's better to store an old TV than give it to a recycler that may export it to poor countries. The Basel Action Network announced its e-Stewards program last month to ensure safe handling of electronics by using only recyclers certified by accredited organizations. It now lists 45 recyclers in 80 locations. Samsung and other companies have signed on. Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, back it.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} 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 example of Telewest is mentioned to show that

单选题Which of the following statements about manufacturing before 1870 can be inferred from the passage?______

单选题Vacation schools and extracurricular activities are mentioned in Para. 2 to illustrate alternatives to formal education pro- vided ______ by public schools.

单选题Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the great disparity between the native population of America in 1492--new estimates of which jump as high as 100 million, or approximately one-sixth of the human race at that time--and the few million full-blooded Native Americans alive at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that chronic disease was an important factor in the sharp decline, and it is highly probable that the greatest killer was epidemic disease, especially as manifested in virgin-soil epidemics. Virgin-soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless. That virgin-soil epidemics were important in American history is strongly indicated by evidence that a number of dangerous maladies--smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more--were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World. The effects of their sudden introduction are demonstrated in the early chronicles of America, which contain reports of horrible epidemics and steep population declines, confirmed in many cases by quantitative analyzes of Spanish tribute records and other sources. The evidence provided by the documents of British and French colonies is not as definitive because the conquerors of those areas did not establish permanent settlements and began to keep continuous records until the seventeenth century, by which time the worst epidemics had probably already taken place. Furthermore, the British tended to drive the native populations away, rather than to enslave them as the Spaniards did, so that the epidemics of British America occurred beyond the range of colonists' direct observation. Even so, the surviving records of North America do contain references to deadly epidemics among the native population. In 1616--1619 an epidemic, possibly of pneumonic plague, swept coastal New England, killing as many as nine out of ten, During the 1630's smallpox, the disease most fatal to the Native American people, eliminated half the population of the Huron and Iroquois confederations. In the 1820's fever ruined the people of the Columbia River area, killing eight out of ten of them. Unfortunately, the documentation of these and other epidemics is slight and frequently unreliable, and it is necessary to supplement what little we do know with evidence from recent epidemics among Native Americans. For example, in 1952 an outbreak of measles among the Native American inhabitants of Ungava Bay, Quebec, affected 99 percent of the population and killed 7 percent, even though some had the benefit of modern medicine. Cases such as this demonstrate that even diseases that are not normally fatal can have destroying consequences when they strike an immunologically defenseless community.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} "What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?" asks an old software industry joke. Answer: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. The boss of Oracle is hardly alone among corporate chiefs in having a reputation for being rather keen on himself. Indeed, until the bubble burst and the public turned nasty at the start of the decade, the cult of the celebrity chief executive seemed to demand bossly narcissism, as evidence that a firm was being led by an all-conquering hero. Narcissus in Greek myth met a nasty end, of course. And in recent years, boss-worship has come to be seen as bad for business. In his management besteller, Good to Great, Jim Collins argued that the truly successful bosses were not the self-proclaimed stars who adorn the covers of Forbes and Fortune, but instead self-effacing, thoughtful, monkish sorts who lead by inspiring example. A statistical answer may be at hand. For the first time, a new study, "It's All About Me", to be presented next week at the annual gathering of the American Academy of Management, offers a systematic, empirical analysis of what effect narcissistic bosses have on the firms they run. The authors, Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambriek, of Pennsylvania State University, examined narcissism in the upper echelons of 105 firms in the computer, and software industries. To do this, they had to solve a practical problem: studies of narcissism have hitherto relied on surveying individuals personally, something for which few chief executives are likely to have time or inclination. So the authors devised an index of narcissism using six publicly available indicators obtainable without the co-operation of the boss. These are: the prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report; his prominence in company press releases; the length of his "Who's Who" entry; the frequency of his use of the first person singular in interviews; and the ratios of his cash and non-cash compensation to those of the firm's second-highest paid executive. Narcissism naturally drives people to seek positions of power and influence, and because great self-esteem helps your professional advance, say the authors, chief executives will tend on average to be more narcissistic than the general population. How does that affect a firm? Messrs Chatterjee and Hambrick found that highly narcissistic bosses tended to make bigger changes in the use of important resources, such as research and development, or in spending and leverage; they carried out more and bigger mergers and acquisitions; and their results were both more extreme (more big wins or big losses) and more volatile than those of firms run by their humbler peers. For shareholders, that could be good or bad.

单选题By "Gossip also is a form of social bonding" (Para. 5), Professor Aaron Ben-Ze'ev means gossip______.

单选题Every year 100 million holiday-makers are drawn to the Mediterranean. With one third of the world's tourist trade, it is the most popular of all the holiday destinations: it is also the most polluted. It has only 1 percent of the world's sea surface, but carries more than half the oil and tar floating on the waters. Thousands of factories pour their poison into the Mediterranean, and almost every city, town and village on the coast sluices its sewage, untreated, into the sea. The result is that the Mediterranean, which nurtured so many civilizations, is gravely ill-the first of the seas to fall victim to the abilities and attitudes that evolved around it. And the population does not merely stifle the life of the sea-it threatens the people who inhabit and visit its shores. Typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, polio, viral hepatitis and food poisoning are endemic in the area, and there are periodic outbreaks of cholera. The mournful litany of disease is caused by sewage. Eight-five percent of the waste from the Mediterranean's 120 coastal cities is pushed out into the waters where their people and visitors bathe and fish. What is more, most cities just drop it in straight off the beach; rare indeed are the places like Cannes and Tel Aviv which pipe it even half a mile offshore. Less than 100, 000 of Greece's four million coastal people have their sewage properly treated-and Greece, is one of the cleaner countries of the northern shore. The worst parts of the sea are Israeli/Lebanon coast and between Barcelona and Genoa, which flushes out over 200 tons of sewage each year for every mile of its length. Not surprisingly, vast areas of the shallows are awash with bacteria and it doesn't take long for these to reach people. Professor William Brumfit of the Royal Free Hospital once calculated that anyone who goes for a swim in the Mediterranean has a one in seven chance of getting some sort of disease. Other scientists say this is an overestimate; but almost all of them agree that bathers are at risk. An even greater danger lurks in the seductive seafood dishes that add so much interest to holiday menu. Shellfish are prime carriers of many of the most vicious diseases of the area. They often grow amid pollution. And even if they don't they are frequently infected by the popular practice of "freshening them up" -throwing filthy water over them in markets. Industry adds its own poisons. Factories cluster round the coastline, and even the most modern rarely has proper waste-treatment plant. They do as much damage to the sea as sewage. Fifteen thousand factories foul the Italian Lihurian Riviera. Sixty thousand pollute the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia, Sicily and the west Italian coast! The lagoon of Venice alone receives the effluents of 76 factories. Thousands of tons of pesticides are blown off the fields into the sea, detergents from millions of sinks kill fish, and fertilizers, flushed out to sea, nourish explosions of plankton which cover bathers with itchy slime. Then there is the oil-130, 000 tons pouring each year from ships, 115, 000 tons more from industries round the shore. Recent studies show that the Mediterranean is four times as polluted as the north Atlantic, 20 times as bad as the north-east Pacific. Apart from the nine-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean is landlocked, virtually unable to cleanse itself. It takes 80 years for the water to be renewed, through the narrow, shallow straits, far too slow a process to cope with the remorseless rush of pollution.