单选题The word "luminaries" ( Line 3, Paragraph 4) most probably refers to people who

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} AMERICA'S central bank sent a clear message this week. For the second consecutive meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank's policy-making committee, left short term interest rates unchanged at 1.75%. But it said that the risks facing the economy had shifted from economic weakness to a balance between weakness and excessive growth. This shift surprised no one. But it has convinced many people that interest rates are set to rise again--and soon. Judging by prices in futures markets, investors are betting that short-term interest rates could start rising as early as May, and will be 1.25 percentage points higher by the end of the year. That may be excessive. Economists at Goldman Sachs, who long argued that the central bank would do nothing this year, now expect short-term rates to go up only 0.75% this year, starting in June. But virtually everyone reckons some Fed tightening is in the offing. The reason? After an unprecedented 11 rate-cuts in 2001, short term interest rates are abnormally low. As the signs of robust recovery multiply, analysts expect the Fed to take back some of the rate-cuts it used as an "insurance policy" after the September 11th terrorist attack. They think there will be a gradual move from the Fed's {{U}}current "accommodative" monetary stance{{/U}} to a more neutral policy. And a neutral policy, many argue, ultimately implies short term interest rates of around 4 %. Logical enough. But higher rates could still be further off, particularly if the recovery proves less robust than many hope. Certainly, recent economic indicators have been extraordinarily strong: unemployment fell for the second consecutive month in February and industrial production rose in both January and February. The manufacturing sector is growing after 18 months of decline. The most optimistic Wall Streeters now expect GDP to have expanded by between 5% and 6% on an annual basis in the first quarter. But one strong quarter does not imply a sustainable recovery. In the short term, the bounce-back is being driven by a dramatic restocking of inventories. But it can be sustained only if corporate investment recovers and consumer spending stays buoyant. With plenty of slack capacity around and many firms stuck with huge debts and lousy profits, it is hard to see where surging investment will come from. And, despite falling unemployment, America's consumers could disappoint the bulls. These uncertainties alone suggest the central bank will be cautious about raising interest rates. Indeed, given the huge pressure on corporate profits, the Federal Reserve might be happy to see consumer prices rise slightly. In short, while Wall Street frets about when and how much interest rates will go up. The answer may well be not soon and not much.

单选题Aldous Huxley's remark implies that

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. (40 points){{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer, the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions. We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing. Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly unpleasant, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television shot, their decisions tallied well with judgments made after a longer period of examination. In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice." Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors," Lindgaard warns. For a typical commercial website, 60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google. This makes a user's first impression even more critical. The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the "halo effect": if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content more favorably. This is because of "cognitive bias". People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to "prove" to themselves that they made a good initial decision. "It's awfully scary stuff, but the tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize". These days, enlightened web users want to see a "puritan" approach. It's about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that's where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right. Of course, the other golden rule is to make sure that your web pages load quickly, otherwise your customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression. "That can be the difference between big business and no business".

单选题The 1920s was the decade of advertising. The advertising men went wild: everything from salt to household coal was being nationally advertised. Of course, ads had been around for a long time. But something new was happening, in terms of both scale and strategy. For the first time, business began to use advertising as a psychological weapon against consumers. Without their product, the consumer would be left unmarried, fall victim to a terrible disease, or be passed over for a promotion. N/Is developed an association between the product and one's very identity. Eventually they came to promise everything and anything-from self-esteem to status, friendship, and love. This psychological approach was a response to the economic dilemma business faced. Americans in the middle classes and above (to whom virtually all advertising was targeted) were no longer buying to satisfy basic needs-such as food, clothing and shelter. These had been met. Advertisers had to persuade consumers to acquire things they most certainly did not need. In other words, production would have to "create the wants it sought to satisfy". This is exactly what manufacturers tried to do. The normally conservative telephone company attempted to transform the plain telephone into a luxury, urging families to buy "all the telephones that they can conveniently use, rather than the smallest amount they can get along with" . One ad campaign targeted fifteen phones as the style for a wealthy home. Business clearly understood the nature of the problem. According to one historian: "Business had learned as never before the importance of the final consumer. Unless he or she could be persuaded to buy, and buy extravagantly, the whole stream of new cars, cigarettes, women's make-up, and electric refrigerators would be dammed up at its outlets." But would the consumer be equal to her/his task as the foundation of private enterprise? A top executive of one American car manufacturer stated the matter bluntly: business needs to create a dissatisfied consumer; its mission is "the organized creation of dissatisfaction". This executive led the way by introducing annual model changes for his company's cars, designed to make the consumer unhappy with what he or she already had. Other companies followed his lead. Economic success now depended on the promotion of qualities like waste and self-indulgence. The campaign to create new and unlimited wants did not go unchallenged. Trade unions and those working for social reform understood the long-term consequences of materialism for most Americans: it would keep them locked in capitalism's trap. The consumption of luxuries required long hours at work. Business was explicit in its resistance to increases in free time, preferring consumption as the alternative to taking economic progress in the form of leisure. In effect, business offered up the cycle of work-and-spend.

单选题Who is against euthanasia?______.

单选题Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined the second bubbly half of the 1990s. That period, readers might recall, was characterized by a collective splurge that saw the creation of some of the most indebted companies in history, many of which later went bankrupt or were themselves broken up. Wild bidding for telecoms, internet and media assets, not to mention the madness that was Daimler's $40 billion motoring takeover in 1998-1999 of Chrysler or the Time-Warner/AOL mega-merger in 2000, helped to give mergers a thoroughly bad name. A consensus emerged that M&A was a great way for investment banks to reap rich fees, and a sure way for ambitious managers to betray investors by trashing the value of their shares. Now M&A is back. Its return is a global phenomenon, but it is perhaps most striking in Europe, where so far this year there has been a stream of deals worth more than $600 billion in total, around 40% higher than in the same period of 2004. The latest effort came this week when France's Saint-Gobain, a building-materials firm, unveiled the details of its￡3.6 billion ($6.5 billion) hostile bid for BPB, a British rival. In the first half of the year, cross-border activity was up threefold over the same period last year. Even France Telecom, which was left almost bankrupt at the end of the last merger wave, recently bought Amena , a Spanish mobile operator. Shareholder's approval of all these deals raises an interesting question for companies everywhere, are investors right to think that these mergers are more likely to succeed than earlier ones? There are two answers. The first is that past mergers may have been judged too harshly. The second is that the present rash of European deals does look more rational, but-and the caveat is crucial-only so far. The pattern may not hold. M&A 's poor reputation stems not only from the string of spectacular failures in the 1990s, but also from studies that showed value destruction for acquiring shareholders in 80% of deals. But more recent studies by economists have introduced a note of caution. Investors should look at the number of deals that succeed or fail (typically measured by the impact on the share price), rather than (as you might think) weighing them by size. For example, no one doubts that the Daimler-Chrysler merger destroyed value. The combined market value of the two firms is still below that of Daimler alone before the deal. This single deal accounted for half of all German M&A activity by value in 1998 and 1999, and probably dominated people's thinking about mergers to the same degree. Throw in a few other such monsters and it is no wonder that broad studies have tended to find that mergers are a bad idea. The true picture is more complicated.

单选题By way of explanation the man produced all the following proofs EXCEPT______

单选题The discovery of life beyond Earth would transform not only our science but also our religions, our belief systems and our entire world-view. For in a sense, the search for extraterrestrial life is really a search for ourselves--who we are and what our place is in the grand sweep of the cosmos. Contrary to popular belief, speculation that we are not alone in the universe is as old as philosophy itself. The essential steps in the reasoning were based on the atomic theory of the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. Yet philosophy is one thing, filling in the physical details is another. Although astronomers increasingly suspect that biofriendly planets may be abundant in the universe, the chemical steps leading to life remain largely mysterious. Traditionally, biologists believed that life is a freak--the result of a zillion-to-one accidental concatenation of molecules. It follows that the likelihood of its happening again elsewhere in the cosmos is infinitesimal. This viewpoint derives from the second law of thermodynamics, which predicts that the universe is dying--slowly and inexorably degenerating toward a state of total chaos. And similar reasoning applies to evolution. According to the orthodox view, Darwinian selection is utterly blind. Any impression that the transition from microbes to man represents progress is pure chauvinism of our part. The path of evolution is merely a random walk through the realm of possibilities. If this is right, there can be no directionality, no innate drive forward; in particular, no push toward consciousness and intelligence. Should Earth be struck by an asteroid, destroying all higher life-forms, intelligent beings would almost certainly not arise next time around. There is, however, a contrary view--one that is gaining strength and directly challenges orthodox biology. It is that complexity can emerge spontaneously through a process of self- organization. If matter and energy have an inbuilt tendency to amplify and channel organized complexity, the odds against the formation of life and the subsequent evolution of intelligence could be drastically shortened. Historically, Bertrand Russell argued that a universe under a death sentence from the second law of thermodynamics rendered human life ultimately futile. All our achievements, all our struggles, "all the noonday brightness of human genius," as he put it, would, in the final analysis, count for nothing if the very cosmos itself is doomed. But what if, in spite of the second law of thermodynamics, there can be systematic progress alongside decay? For those who hope for a deeper meaning or purpose beneath physical existence, the presence of extraterrestrial life-forms would provide a spectacular boost, implying that we live in a universe that is in some sense getting better and better rather than worse and worse.

单选题According to the author, a healthy family should be based on ______.

单选题We learn from the last paragraph that______.

单选题According to the author, we should reverse our classification of the physical sciences as "hard" and the social sciences as "soft" because ______.

单选题On September 30th students at the University of Massachusetts threw a toga (a ceremonial gown) party. The cops showed up, uninvited. They charged the host, James Connolly, with underage drinking, making too much noise, and having a keg without a licence. For punishment, he had to put on his toga again and stand in front of the police station for an hour. Dan Markel of Florida State University reckons that such "shaming punishments" are on the rise. In 2003 a couple of teenagers who defaced a nativity scene in Ohio had to parade through town with a donkey. "The punishment must fit the crime," explained the judge, Michael Cicconetti. Several cities have aired the names of men caught soliciting prostitutes on "John TV". In 2004, a federal appeals court agreed that a mail thief could be made to stand outside a California post office wearing a sandwich board. "I stole mail," it read. "This is my punishment." In Virginia, if you fail to pay child support, you may find your car wheel-clamped: pink if you are neglecting a girl, blue for a boy. Many support shaming punishments. Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University has argued that they are a good way to express communal values. Fines, in contrast, imply that you can buy a clear conscience. And shame seems to be a powerful deterrent. Mr Cicconetti says he sees few repeat offenders. Cheerful Hobbesian types want everyone to know who the bad guys are, so that decent citizens can avoid them. Others are doubtful. According to Mr Markel, shaming punishments undermine human dignity. He suggests alternative punishments that omit the public-humiliation factor. A landlord who flouts the health code, for example, could be made to stay in one of his own slums. And it is true that there is something unpleasant about the desire to see other people humiliated. Remember the matron who objects to Hester Prynne's scarlet letter: "Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or suchlike heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!" But voters appear to be comfortable on the high horse. Ted Poe, a former district judge from Texas, made his reputation by issuing a string of embarrassing sentences. He called this "Poetic justice." Once, he sentenced a man who stole pistols from the Lone Ranger to shovel manure in the Houston police stables. In 2004 Mr Poe was elected to the House of Representatives at his first attempt.

单选题Schools have banned cupcakes, issued obesity report cards and cleared space in cafeterias for salad bars. Just last month, Michelle Obama's campaign to end childhood obesity promised to get young people moving more and improve school lunch, and beverage makers said they had cut the sheer number of liquid calories shipped to schools by almost 90 percent in the past five years. But new research suggests that interventions aimed at school-aged children may be, if not too little, too late. More and more evidence points to crucial events very early in life—during the toddler years, infancy and even before birth—that can set young children on an obesity track that is hard to alter by the time they're in kindergarten. The evidence is not invulnerable, but it suggests that prevention efforts should start very early. Among the findings are these: The chubby angelic baby who is growing so nicely may be growing too much for his or her own good, research suggests. Babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are at risk of becoming obese, even though the babies are usually small at birth Babies who sleep less than 12 hours are at increased risk for obesity later. If they don't sleep enough and also watch two hours or more of TV a day, they are at even greater risk. Some early interventions are already widely practiced. Doctors recommend that overweight women lose weight before pregnancy rather than after, to cut the risk of obesity and diabetes in their children; breast-feeding is also recommended to lower the obesity risk. But weight or diet restrictions on young children have been avoided. " It used to be kind of taboo to label a child under 5 as overweight or obese, even if the child was—the thinking was that it was too disgraceful, " said Dr. Elsie M. Taveras of Harvard Medical School, lead author of a recent paper on racial difference in early risk factors. Scientists worry about what are called epigenetic changes. The genes inherited from mother and father may be turned on and off and the strength of their effects changed by environmental conditions in early development. Many doctors are concerned about women being obese and unhealthy before pregnancy because, as they point out, the womb is the baby's first environment. Experts say change may require abandoning some cherished cultural attitudes. " The idea that a big baby is a healthy baby, and a crying baby is probably a hungry baby who should be fed, are things we really need to rethink, " Dr. Birch said.

单选题You feel tired all day probably because ______.