单选题Nine months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the world's economic crisis is still usually discussed as though it consisted of dire bank balance-sheets, falling exports and bankruptcies or job losses in the West. But at the other end of the trail that starts with financial woes in rich countries are underweight children and anaemic expectant mothers in poor ones. New research by the United Nations' standing committee on nutrition gives a first estimate of how the crisis has hurt the group of people most affected by the crash: the very poorest. In 1990～2007, the number of hungry people rose by about 80 million, though this was, by and large, a period of rising incomes in developing countries. In 2008 alone, the number rose a further 40 million, to 963 million—half as much in one year as during the previous 17. In other words, lots more children and pregnant women are not getting the food they need. The report reckons that the number of underweight children will rise from 121 million to 125 million by 2010, assuming no change in the size of the world economy (in fact, it is expected to shrink 2% this year). The World Bank has already estimated that until 2015 the crisis will lead to between 200,000 and 400,000 more children dying every year. The poorest face two crises: the world recession and the resumption of food price rises. Food prices had been falling but even then, the global price fall did not translate into a comparable decline on local markets in most poor countries, so the poor did not benefit much. World prices bottomed out in December 2008 and have since risen 26%. In the poorest countries, a rise of 50% in the price of staples pushes up the family food budget from 50% to 60% of household income. Initially, people skimp on non-staple foods, cutting the quality and diversity of their intake; in the next stage, the quantity and safety of diets suffer. That in turn damages their health. Currently, around 50 million, or 40%, of pregnant women in developing countries are anaemic. Anaemia in expectant mothers, which causes low birth weight and unhealthier babies, is likely to rise by a further 1.2 million in Asia and 700,000 in Africa. To make matters worse, this is happening at a time when the global slump is causing job losses or wage squeezes everywhere—worldwide unemployment rose to 6% in 2008—so in some poor countries, it now takes an extra ten hours a week or more to feed a family of five. The resulting burden falls heavily on women. As the report says starkly: "Women are usually the last to benefit from increasing income but they are usually the first to make sacrifices when the financial situation deteriorates. /

单选题It is often observed that the aged spend much time thinking and talking about their past lives, rather than about the future. These reminiscences are not simply random or trivial memories, (1) is their purpose merely to make conversation. The old person's recollections of the past help to (2) an identity that is becoming increasingly fragile. (3) any role that brings respect or any goal that might provide (4) to the future, the individual mentions their (5) as a reminder to listeners, that here was a life (6) living. (7) , the memories form part of a continuing life (8) , in which the old person (9) the events and experiences of the years gone by and (10) on the overall meaning of his or her own almost completed life. As the life cycle (11) to its close, the aged must also learn to accept the reality of their own impending death. (12) this task is made difficult by the fact that death is almost a (13) subject in the United States. The mere discussion of death is often regarded as (14) As adults, many of us find the topic frightening and are (15) to think about it and certainly not to talk about it (16) the presence of someone who is dying. Death has achieved this taboo (17) only in the modern industrial societies. There seems to be an important reason for our reluctance to (18) the idea of death. It is the very fact that death remains (19) our control; it is almost the only one of the natural processes (20) is so.

单选题Everyday some 16m barrels of oil leave the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. That is enough to fill a soft-drink can for everyone on earth, or to power every motor vehicle on the planet for 25 miles (40kin). Gulf oil accounts for 40% of global trade in the sticky stuff. More important, it makes up two-thirds of known deposits. Whereas at present production rates the rest of the world's oil reserves will last for a mere 25 years, the Gulf's will last for 100. In other words, the region's strategic importance is set to grow and grow. Or at least so goes the conventional wisdom, which is usually rounded out with scary talk of unstable supplies, spendthrift regimes and a potential fundamentalist menace. Yet all those numbers come with caveats. A great deal of oil is consumed by the countries that produce it rather than traded, so in reality the Gulf accounts for less than a quarter of the world's daily consumption. As for reserves, the figures are as changeable as a mirage in the desert. The most comprehensive research available, conducted by the US Geological Survey, refers to an "expected" total volume for global hydrocarbon deposits that is about double current known reserves. Using that figure, and throwing in natural gas along with oil, it appears that the Gulf contains a more moderate 30% or so of the planet's future fossil-fuel supplies. Leaving out the two Gulf states that are not covered in this survey--Iran and Iraq--the remaining six between them hold something like 20% of world hydrocarbon reserves, not much more than Russia. All the same, it is still a hefty chunk; enough, you might think, to keep the people living atop the wells in comfort for the foreseeable future. But you might be wrong. At present, the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council have a combined national income roughly equal to Switzerland's, but a population which, at around 30m, is more than four times as big. It is also the fastest-growing on earth, having increased at nine times the Swiss rate over the past quarter-century. Meanwhile the region's share of world oil trade has fallen, as has the average price per barrel. As a result, the income per person generated by GCC oil exports has been diminishing since the 1970s. True, surging demand from America and Asia has recently boosted the Gulf's share of trade, but the medium-term outlook for oil pries remains weak. Combined with continued growth in oil consumption, this should create sustained upward pressure on prices. And high oil prices will speed the search for alternatives. Who knows, in 20 years' time fuel cells and hydrogen power may have started to become commercial propositions.

单选题Within 80 years, some scientists estimate, the world must produce more than eight times the present world food supply. The productiveness of the sea raises our hopes for an adequate food supply in the future. Aided by men of science, we have set forth to find out that 70 percent of the earth remains unexplored--the ocean depths. Thus, we may better discover and utilize the sea"s natural products for the world"s hungry. It is fish protein concentrate that is sought from the seas. By utilizing the unharvested fish in United States waters alone, enough fish protein concentrate can be obtained to provide supplemental animal protein for more than one billion people for one year at the cost of less than half a cent per day per person. The malnutrition of children is terribly tragic. But the crime lies in society"s unrestrained breeding, not in its negligence in producing fish powder. But wherever the population projects are carefully considered, the answer to the problem is something like this: There are few projects that could do more to raise the nutritional level of mankind than a full-scale scientific effort to develop the resources of the sea. Each year some thirty million tons of food products are taken from the sea, which account for 12 percent of the world"s animal proteins. Nations with their swelling populations must push forward into the sea frontiers for food supplies. Private industry must step up its marine research and the federal government must make new attacks on the problems of marine research development. There is a tone of desperateness in all these designs on the sea. But what is most startling is the assumption that the seas are an untouched resource. The fact is that the seas have been, and are being, hurt directly and indirectly, by the same forces that have abused the land. In the broad pattern of ecological relationships the seas are not separable from what happens on the land. The poisons that pollute the soil and the air bring in massive doses into the "continental shelf" waters. The dirt and pollution that spills from our urban sewers and industrial out falls despoil our bays and coastal waters. All the border seas are already heavily polluted by the same exploitation drives that have undermined the quality of life on land.

单选题The biggest problem media executives are facing nowadays is

单选题Joseph Rykwert entered his field when post-war modernist architecture was coming under fire for its alienating embodiment of outmoded social ideals. Think of the UN building in New York. the city of Brasilia. the UNESCO building in Paris, the blocks of housing "projects" throughout the world. These tall. uniform boxes are set back from the street, isolated by windswept plazas. They look inward to their own functions, presenting no "face" to the inhabitants of the city, no "place" for social interaction. For Mr. Rykwert. who rejects the functionalist spirit of the Athens Charter of 1933. a manifesto for much post-war building, such facelessness destroys the human meaning of the city. Architectural form should not rigidly follow function, but ought to reflect the needs of the social body it represents. Like other forms of representation, architecture is the embodiment of the decisions that go into its making, not the result of impersonal forces, market or history. Therefore. says Mr. Rykwert, adapting Joseph de Maistre's dictum that a nation has the government it deserves, our cities have the faces they deserve. In this book. Mr. Rykwert. a noted urban historian of anthropological love, offers a flaneur's approach to the city's exterior surface rather than an urban history from the conceptual inside out. He does not drive, so his interaction with the city affords him a warts-and-all view with a sensual grasp of what it is to be a "place". His story of urbanization begins, not surprisingly, with the industrial revolution when populations shifted and increased, exacerbating problems of housing and crime. In the 19th century many planning programs and utopias (Ebenezer Howard's garden city and Charles Fourier's "phalansteries" among them) were proposed as remedies. These have left their mark on 20th-century cities, as did Baron Hausmann's boulevards in Paris, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc's and Owen Jones's arguments for historical style, and Adolf Loos's fateful turn-of-the-century call to abolish ornament which, in turn, inspired Le Corbusier's bare functionalism. The reader will recognize all these ideas in the surfaces of the cities that hosted them: New York. Paris. London, and Vienna. Cities changed again after the Second World War as populations grew. technology raced and prosperity spread. Like it or not, today's cities are the muddled product, among other things, of speed. greed, outmoded social agendas and ill-suited postmodern aesthetics. Some lament the old city's death; others welcome its replacement by the electronically driven "global village". Mr, Rykwert has his worries, to be sure. but he does not see ruin or chaos everywhere. He defends the city as a human and social necessity. In Chandigarh, Canberra and New York he sees overall success; in New Delhi, Paris and Shanghai, large areas of falling. For Mr. Rykwert. a man on foot in the age of speeding virtual, good architecture may still show us a face where flaneurs can read the story of their urban setting in familiar metaphors.

单选题The passage concludes that ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} In a science-fiction movie called "Species", a mysterious signal from outer space turns out to describe the genome of an unknown organism. When the inevitable mad scientist synthesizes the DNA described by the instructions, the creature he breeds from it turns out to resemble Natasha Henstridge, an athletic actress. Unfortunately, the alien harbors within her delicate form the destructive powers of a Panzer division, and it all ends badly for the rash geneticist and his laboratory. Glen Evans, chief executive of Egea Biosciences in San Diego, California, acknowledges regretfully that despite seeking his expert opinion—in return for which he was presented with the poster of the striking Mr Henstridge that hangs on his office wall—the producers of "Species" did not {{U}}hew very closely{{/U}} to his suggestions about the feasibility of their script ideas. Still, they had come to the right man. Dr Evans believes that his firm will soon be able to create, if not an alien succubus, at least a tiny biological machine made of artificial proteins that could mimic the behavior of a living cell. Making such proteins will require the ability to synthesize long stretches of DNA. Existing technology for synthesizing DNA can manage to make genes that encode a few dozen amino acids, but this is too short to produce any interesting proteins. Egea's technology, by contrast, would allow biologists to manufacture genes wholesale. The firm's scientists can make genes long enough to encode 6,000 amino acids. They aim to synthesize a gene for 30,000 amino acids within two years. Using a library of the roughly 1,500 possible "motifs" or folds that a protein can adopt, Egea's scientists employ computers to design new proteins that are likely to have desirable shapes and properties. To synthesize the DNA that encodes these proteins, Egea uses a machine it has dubbed the "genewriter". Dr Evans likens this device to a word-processor for DNA, on which you can type in the sequence of letters defining a piece of DNA and get that molecule out. As Egea extends the length of DNA it can synthesize, Dr Evans envisages encoding not just proteins, but entire biochemical pathways, which are teams of proteins that conduct metabolic processes. A collection of such molecules could conceivably function as a miniature machine that would operate in the body and attack disease, just as the body's own defensive cells do. Perhaps Dr Evans and his colleagues ought to get in touch with their friends in Hollywood.

单选题In the last three paragraphs, the writer intends to show ______.

单选题The World Health Organization says as many as 10 million persons worldwide may have the virus(病毒)that causes AIDS. Experts believe about 350 thousand persons have the disease. And one million more may get it in the next five years. In the United States, about 50000 persons have died with AIDS. The country's top medical official says more than 90 percent of all Americans who had the AIDS virus five years ago are dead. There is no cure for AIDS and no vaccine (疫苗) medicine to prevent it. However, researchers know much more about AIDS than they did just a few years ago. We now know that AIDS is caused by a virus. The virus invades healthy cells including white blood cells that are part of our defense system against disease. It takes control of the healthy cell's genetic(遗传的)material and forces the cell to make a copy of the virus. The cell then dies. And the viral particles move on to invade and kill more healthy cells. The AIDS virus is carried in a person's body fluids. The virus can be passed sexually or by sharing instruments used to take intravenous (静脉内的) drugs. It also can be passed in blood products or from a pregnant woman with AIDS to her developing baby. Many stories about the spread of AIDS are false. You cannot get AIDS by working or attending school with someone who has the disease. You cannot get it by touching, drinking glasses or other objects used by such persons. Experts say no one has gotten AIDS by living with, caring for or touching an AIDS patient. There are several warning signs of an AIDS infection. They include always feeling tired, unexplained weight loss and uncontrolled expulsion of body wastes(大小便失禁). Other warnings are the appearance of white areas on the mouth, dark red areas of skin that do not disappear and a higher than normal body temperature.

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Which of the following can NOT reduce the reliance upon excavation?

单选题At the ceremony at Yale University in 1983, several honorary degrees were awarded, including one to Mother Teresa. As she and other humanitarians and scholars, each in turn, received their awards, the audience applauded appropriately but with a slight hint of reserve and impatience, for it wished to give its heart to the final recipient who waited shyly in the wings. As the details of her achievements were being recounted, many people left their seats and surged toward the stage to be closer to the great woman. And when the name Meryl Streep was announced, the audience unleashed a sonic boom of affection to wake the New Haven dead. One man who was present when Bob Hope received his honorary doctorate at another institution said that Dr. Streep's applause surpassed Dr. Hope's. Knowing how to please a crowd as well as anyone, the intellectual leaders at Yale invited Dick Cavett, the talk-show host, to deliver the commencement address the following year. It is rumored that this year, Don Rickles will receive a Doctorate of Humane Letters and Lola Falana will give the commencement address. Prior to the 1984 presidential elections, the two candidates confronted each other on television in what were called "debates." These events were not in the least like the Lincoln-Douglas debates or anything else that goes by the name. Each candidate was given five minutes to address such questions as, What is (or would be) your policy in Central America? His opposite number was then given one minute for a rebuttal. In such circumstances, complexity, documentation and logic can play no role, and, indeed, on several occasions syntax itself was abandoned entirely. It is no matter. The men were less concerned with giving arguments than with "giving off" impressions, which is what television does best. Post-debate commentary largely avoided any evaluation of the candidates' ideas, since there were none to evaluate. Instead, the debates were conceived as boxing matches, the relevant question being, Who KO'd whom? The answer was determined by the "style" of the men—how they looked, fixed their gaze, smiled, and delivered one-liners. In the second debate, President Reagan got off a swell one-liner when asked a question about his age. The following day, several newspapers indicated that Ron had KO'd Fritz with his joke. Thus, the leader of the free world is chosen by the people in the Age of Television. What all of this means is that our culture has moved toward a new way of conducting its business, especially its important business. The nature of its discourse is changing as the demarcation line between what is show business and what is not becomes harder to see with each passing day. Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship. Had Irving Berlin changed one word in the title of his celebrated song, he would have been as prophetic, albeit more terse, as Aldous Huxley. He need only have written, There's No Business But Show Business.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} If sustainable competitive advantage depends on work-force skills, American firms have a problem. Human-resource management is not traditionally seen as central to the competitive survival of the firm in the United States. Skill acquisition is considered an individual responsibility. Labor is simply another factor of production to be hired—rented at the lowest possible cost—much as one buys raw materials or equipment. The lack of importance attached to human-resource management can be seen in the corporate hierarchy. In an American firm the chief financial officer is almost always second in command. The post of head of human resource management is usually a specialized job, off at the edge of corporate hierarchy. The executive who holds it is never consulted on major strategic decisions and has no chance to move up to Chief Executive Officer (CEO). By way of contrast, in Japan the head of human-resource management is central—usually the second most important executive, after the CEO, in the firm's hierarchy. While American firms often talk about the vast amounts spent on training their work forces, in fact they invest less in the skills of their employees than do either Japanese or German firms. The money they do invest is also more highly concentrated on professional and managerial employees. And the limited investments that are made in training workers are also much more narrowly focused on the specific skills necessary to do the next job rather than on the basic background skills that make it possible to absorb new technologies. As a result, problems emerge when new breakthrough technologies arrive. If American workers, for example, take much longer to learn how to operate new flexible manufacturing stations than workers in Germany (as they do), the effective cost of those stations is lower in Germany than it is in the United States. More time is required before equipment is up and running at capacity, and the need for extensive retraining generates costs and creates bottlenecks that limit the speed with which new equipment can be employed. The result is a slower pace of technological change. And in the end the skills of the bottom half of the population affect the wages of the top half. If the bottom half can' t effectively staff the processes that have to be operated, the management and professional jobs that go with these processes will disappear.

单选题In the eyes of the author, a political reform in Japan ______.