单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} For the past two years in Silicon Valley, the centre of America's technology industry, conference-goers have entertained themselves playing a guessing game: how many times will a speaker mention the phrase "long tail"? It is usually a high number, thanks to the influence of the long-tail theory, which was first developed by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, in an article in 2004. Though technologists and bloggers chuckle at how every business presentation now has to have its long-tail section, most are envious of Mr. Anderson, whose brainwave quickly became the most fashionable business idea around. Whether a blockbuster film, a bestselling novel, or a chart-topping rap song, popular culture idolises the hit. Companies devote themselves to creating them because the cost of distribution and the limits of shelf space in physical shops mean that profitability depends on a high volume of sales. But around the beginning of this century a group of internet companies realised that with endless shelves and a national or even international audience online they could offer a huge range of products—and make money at the same time. The niche, the obscure and the specialist, Mr. Anderson argues, will gain ground at the expense of the hit. As evidence, he points to a drop in the number of companies that traditionally calculate their revenue/sales ratio according to the 80/20 rule—where the top fifth of products contribute four-fifths of revenues. Ecast, a San Francisco digital jukebox company, found that 98% of its 10000 albums sold at least one track every three months. Expressed in the language of statistics, the experiences of Ecast and other companies such as Aragon, an online bookseller, suggest that products down in the long tail of a statistical distribution, added together, can be highly profitable. The internet helps people find their way to relatively obscure material with recommendations and reviews by other people, (and for those willing to have their artistic tastes predicted by a piece of software) computer programs which analyse past selections. Long-tail enthusiasts argue that the whole of culture will benefit, not just commercial enterprises. Television, film and music are such bewitching media in their own right that many people are quite happy to watch and listen to what the mainstream provides. But if individuals have the opportunity to pick better, more ideally suited entertainment from a far wider selection, they will take it, according to the theory of the long tail. Some analysts reckon that entire populations might become happier and wiser once they have access to thousands of documentaries, independent films and subgenres of every kind of music, instead of being subjected to what Mr. Anderson calls the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare. That might be taking things a bit far. But the long tail is certainly one of the internet's better gifts to humanity.

单选题The term "grub" ( Line 5, Paragraph 4) most probably means

单选题According to the text, the servant problem is to the ruling class what

单选题An industrial society, especially one as centralized and concentrated as that of Britain, is heavily dependent on certain essential services: for instance, electricity supply, water, rail and road transport, and harbors. The area of dependency has widened to include removing rubbish, hospital and ambulance services, and, as the economy develops, central computer and information services as well. If any of these services ceases to operate, the whole economic system is in danger. It is this economic interdependency of the economic system which makes the power of trade unions such an important issue. Single trade unions have the ability to cut off many countries' economic blood supply. This can happen more easily in Britain than in some other countries, in part because the labor force is highly organized. About 55 percent of British workers belong to unions, compared to under a quarter in the United States. For historical reasons, Britain's unions have tended to develop along trade and occupational lines, rather than on an industry-by-industry basis, which makes a wages policy, democracy in industry and the improvement of procedure for fixing wage levels difficult to achieve. There are considerable strains and tensions in the trade union movement, some of them arising from their outdated and inefficient structure. Some unions have lost many members because of their industrial changes. Others are involved in arguments about who should represent workers in new trades. Unions for skilled trades are separate from general unions, which mean that different levels of wages for certain jobs are often a source of bad feeling between unions. In traditional trades which are being pushed out of existence by advancing technologies, unions can fight for their members' disappointing jobs to the point where the jobs of other union members are threatened or destroyed. The printing of newspapers both in the United States and in Britain has frequently been halted by the efforts of printers to hold on to their traditional highly-paid jobs. Trade unions have problems of internal communication just as managers in companies do, problems which multiply in very large unions or in those which bring workers in very different industries together into a single general union. Some trade union officials have to be re-elected regularly; others are elected, or even appointed, for life. Trade union officials have to work with a system of "shop stewards" in many unions, "shop stewards" being workers elected by other workers as their representatives at factory or works level. (411 words)

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}} The standardized educational or psychological tests that are widely used to aid in selecting, assigning, or promoting students, employees, and military personnel have been the target of recent attacks in books, magazines, the daily press, and even in Congress. The target is wrong, for in attacking the tests, critics divert attention from the fault that lies with ill-informed or incompetent users. The tests themselves are merely tools, with characteristics that can be measured with reasonable precision under specified conditions. Whether the results will be valuable, meaningless, or even misleading depends partly upon the tool itself but largely upon the user. All informed predictions of future performance are based upon some knowledge of relevant past performance. How well the predictions will be validated by later performance depends upon the amount, reliability, and appropriateness of the information used and on the skill and wisdom with which it is interpreted. Anyone who keeps careful score knows that the information available is always incomplete and that the predictions are always subject to error. Standardized tests should be considered in this context. They provide a quick, objective method of getting some kinds of information about what a person has learned, the skills he has developed, or the kind of person he is. The information so obtained has, qualitatively, the same advantages and shortcomings as other kinds of information. Whether to use tests, other kinds of information, or both in a particular situation depends, therefore, upon the empirical evidence concerning comparative validity, and upon such factors as cost and availability. In general, the tests work most effectively when the traits or qualities to be measured can be most precisely defined (for example, ability to do well in a particular course of training program) and least effectively when what is to be measured or predicted cannot be well defined (for example, personality or creativity). Properly used, they provide a rapid means of getting comparable information about many people. Sometimes they identify students whose high potential has not been previously recognized, but there are many things they do not do. For example, they don't compensate for gross social inequality, and thus don't tell how able an underprivileged younger might have been had he grown up under more favorable circumstances. {{B}}Notes:{{/B}} divert attention from 没有注意到。keep careful score 仔细记分。define vt.界定。had he grown up...

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Internet advertising is booming. The industry has gone from $ 9.6 billion in revenue in 2001 to $ 27 billion this year, according to Piper Jaffray, an investment bank. And it is still early days. The internet accounts for only 5% of total spending on advertising, but that figure is expected to reach at least 20% in the next few years. The single largest category within this flourishing industry, accounting for nearly half of all spending, is "pay-per-click" advertising, which is used by firms both large and small to promote their wares. The benefits of the pay-per-click approach over traditional advertising (television, radio, print and billboards are obvious. Since advertisers pay only to reach the small subset who actually respond to an advertisement, the quality of the leads generated is very high, and advertisers are prepared to pay accordingly. The price: per click varies from $ 0.10 to as much as $ 30, depending on the keyword, though the average is around $ 0.50. Google made most of its $ 6.1 billion in revenue last year from pay-per-click advertising. But as pay-per-click advertising has grown into a huge industry, concern has mounted over so-called "click fraud"--bogus clicks that do not come from genuinely interested customers. It takes two main forms. If you click repeatedly on the advertisements on your own website, or get other people or machines to do so on your behalf, you can generate a stream of bogus commissions. Click fraud can also be used by one company against another: clicking on a rival firm's advertisements can saddle it with a huge bill. Bogus clicks are thought to account for around 10% of all click traffic, though nobody knows for sure. A few months ago Mr. Gross pioneered an alternative to the pay-per-click model. In February, Snap, a search engine backed by Mr. Gross, launched "pay-per-action" (PPA), a new model in which advertisers pay only if a click on an ad is followed by an action such as a purchase or a download. Might this put an end to click fraud? Don't bet on it, says Mike Zeman at Starcom, an advertising agency. Payper-action will be a niche, he predicts, since converting a click into an action depends on a variety of factors such as the ease of use of the advertiser's website. Google and its peers will be reluctant to be so dependent on factors outside their control. But Mr. Tobaccowala thinks pay-per-action could become a real alternative to pay-per-click. As bigger companies spend more on internet advertising; they will demand more accountability and a wider range of options, he says. At the very least, that means clamping down on click fraud; but it also presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to invent new models that are less vulnerable to abuse.

单选题Supporters of abortion rights held a lunch recently in honor of a momentous victory for their cause: 40 years ago, New York became the first state to fully legalize abortion. That 1970 law began to reduce the death and injury toll from back-alley abortions and set the stage for the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which made abortion legal nationwide and recognized a constitutional right to privacy. But abortion-rights groups are newly anxious about new assaults on women's reproductive rights, including a fight over abortion that snarled the last days of the health care reform debate. Anti-abortion groups are newly emboldened. Kelli Conlin, head of Naral Pro-Choice New York, told guests at the lunch that "anti-choice forces are mobilizing in every single state to limit a woman's access to abortion in more insidious ways than we can imagine. " As Ms. Conlin was speaking, members of the Oklahoma House were getting ready to override vetoes of two punishing abortion measures. The state's Democratic governor, Brad Henry, rightly viewed these intrusions into women's lives and decision-making as unconstitutional. One of the measures, which seems destined to spawn copycat bills in other states, requires women to undergo an ultrasound before getting an abortion and further mandates that a doctor or technician set up the monitor so the woman can see it and hear a detailed description of the fetus. The other law grants protection from lawsuits to doctors who deliberately withhold fetal testing results that might affect a woman's decision about whether to carry her pregnancy to term. Several states have either passed or are considering bills that would ban abortion coverage in insurance plans sold through the state exchanges established by the federal health care law. A new Utah law criminalizes certain behavior by women that results in miscarriage. Embarking on a road that could lead to the Supreme Court, Nebraska last month banned most abortions at the 20th week of pregnancy based on a questionable theory of fetal pain. About two dozen states are looking at bills to increase counseling requirements or waiting periods prior to abortions. About 20 states are considering new ultrasound requirements. "One in three women in this country will have an abortion in her lifetime, and yet we're having exactly the same discussions and debates we were having forty years ago," Ms. Conlin said. Anti-abortion forces aim ultimately to make abortion illegal. So far, by reducing the number of abortion providers, making insurance coverage more expensive and harder to get, and throwing up other obstacles, they have primarily succeeded in making it harder for women of modest and meager means to obtain a safe and legal medical procedure. The painful decision to end a pregnancy should be made in private between a woman and her doctor—not in politically driven debate among members of Congress and state legislatures.

单选题It's easy to get the sense these days that you've stumbled into a party with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren't. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They've changed into something like their own opposite. There's Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy(慈善事业) with him. There's historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. To flip-flopis human. It can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological(病态的). He's a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush:" He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday -- no matter what happened on Tuesday." Over the past three years, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I've got it all wrong. It looked at first like a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that we're all connected. Everything leans on something, is both dependent and depended on. "The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago," is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it's a line." The remark prompted the professor to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences between the Western and the Asian mind. To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.

单选题Machines and foreign competition will replace millions of American jobs. But work will be plentiful for people trained in the occupations of the future. The Labor Department predicts a net increase of 25 million new jobs in the United States in 1995 with service-industry jobs growing three times as rapidly as factory jobs. "Work will shift its emphasis from the fatigue and monotony of the production line and the typing pool to the more interesting challenge of the electronic service center, the design studio, the research laboratory, the education institute and the training school," predicts Canadian economist Calvert. Jobs in high-tech fields will multiply fastest, but from a low base. In terms of actual numbers, more mundane occupations will experience the biggest surge: custodians, cashiers, secretaries, waiters and clerks. Yet much of the drudge work will be taken on by robots. The number of robots performing blue-collar tasks will increase from 3,000 in 1981 to 40,000 in 1990, says John E. Taylor of the Human Resources Research Organization in Alexandria, Va. Robots might also be found on war zones, in space- even in the office, perhaps making coffee, opening mail and delivering messages. One unsolved problem, what to do with workers displaced by high technology and foreign competition. Around the world "the likelihood of growing permanent unemployment is becoming more accepted as a reality among social planners," notes David Macarov, associate professor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Meantime at the percentage of time people spend on the job is likely to continue to fall. Robert Theobald, author of Avoiding in 1984, fears that joblessness will lead to increasing depression, bitterness and unrest. "The dramatic consequences of such a shift on the Western psyche, which has made the job the way we value human beings, are almost incalculable," he comments. Because of the constantly changing demand for job skills, Ron Kutschner, associate commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, offers this advice for today' s high school students: "Be prepared with a broad education, like the kind pre-college students get--basic math. science and English. Prepare yourself to handle each new technology, as it comes down the road. Then get technology training for your first job. That is the best stepping stone to the second and third jobs./

单选题The result of the increasing costs in natural disasters is

单选题{{B}}Part B{{/B}} Until about two million years ago Africa's vegetation had always been controlled by the interactions of climate; geology, soil, and groundwater conditions; and the activities of animals. The addition of humans to the latter group, however, has increasingly rendered unreal the concept of a fully developed "natural" vegetation-- i. e. , one approximating the ideal of a vegetational climax. (41) _____________________. Early attempts at mapping and classifying Africa's vegetation stressed this relationship: sometimes the names of plant zones were derived directly from climates. In this discussion the idea of zones is retained only in a broad descriptive sense. (42) _____________________. In addition, over time more floral regions of varying shape and size have been recognized. Many schemes have arisen successively, all of which have had to take views on two important aspects: the general scale of treatment to be adopted, and the degree to which human modification is to be comprehended or discounted. (43) _____________________. Quite the opposite assumption is now frequently advanced. An intimate combination of many species--in complex associations and related to localized soils, slopes, and drainage--has been detailed in many studies of the African tropics. In a few square miles there may be a visible succession from swamp with papyrus,, the grass of which the ancient Egyptians made paper and from which the word "paper" originated, through swampy grassland and broad-leaved woodland and grass to a patch of forest on richer hillside soil, and finally to juicy fleshy plants on a nearly naked rock summit. (44) _____________________. Correspondingly, classifications have differed greatly in their principles for naming, grouping, and describing formations: some have chosen terms such as forest, woodland, thorn bush, thicket, and shrub for much of the same broad tracts that others have grouped as wooded savanna (treeless grassy plain) and steppe (grassy plain with few trees). This is best seen in the nomenclature, naming of plants, adopted by two of the most comprehensive and authoritative maps of Africa's vegetation that have been published: R. W. J. Keay's Vegetation Map of Africa South of the Tropic of Cancer and its more widely based successor, The Vegetation Map of Africa, compiled by Frank White. In the Keay map the terms "savanna" and "steppe" were adopted as precise definition of formations, based on the herb layer and the coverage of woody vegetation; the White map, however, discarded these two categories as specific classifications. Yet any rapid absence of savanna as in its popular and more general sense is doubtful. (45) _____________________. However, some 100 specific types of vegetation identified on the source map have been compressed into 14 broader classifications. [A] As more has become known of the many thousands of African plant species and their complex ecology, naming, classification, and mapping have also be e0me more particular, stressing what was actually present rather than postulating about climatic potential. [B] In regions of higher rainfall, such as eastern Africa, savanna vegetation is maintained by periodic fires. Consuming dry grass at the end of the rainy season, the fires burn back the forest vegetation, check the invasion of trees and shrubs, and stimulate new grass growth. [C] Once, as with the scientific treatment of African soils, a much greater uniformity was attributed to the vegetation than would have been generally accepted in the same period for treatments of the lands of western Europe or the United States. [D] The vegetational map of Africa and general vegetation groupings used here follow the White map and its extensive annotations. [E] African vegetation zones are closely linked to climatic zones, with the same zones occurring both north and south of the equator in broadly similar patterns. As with climatic zones, differences in the amount and seasonal distribution of precipitation constitute the most important influence on the development of vegetation. [F] Nevertheless, in broad terms, climate remains the dominant control over vegetation. Zonal belts of precipitation, reflection latitude and contrasting exposure to the Atlantic and Indian oceans and their currents, give some reality to related belts of vegetation. [G] The span of human occupation in Africa is believed to exceed that of any other continent. All the resultant activities have tended, on balance, to reduce tree cover and increase grassland; but there has been considerable dispute among scholars concerning the natural versus human-caused development of most African grasslands at the regional level.

单选题Today there has been a change of attitude towards nature. This is shown in ______.

单选题The writer seems to think that ______.

单选题The author mentions the Baldwin Locomotive Works in line 8 of the third paragraph because it was______