单选题According to the passage, what matters most in letter delivery in Britain is that______

单选题In the two decades between 1910 and 1930, over ten percent of the Black population of the United States left the South, where the majority of the Black population had been located, and migrated to northern states, with the largest number moving, it is claimed, between 1916 and 1918. It has been frequently assumed, but not proved, that most of the migrants in what has come to be called the Great Migration came from rural areas and were motivated by two concurrent factors: the collapse of cotton industry following boll weevil infestation, which began in 1898, and increased demand in the North for labor following the cessation of European immigration caused by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This assumption has led to the conclusion that the migrants" subsequent lack of economic mobility in the North is tied to rural background, a background that implies unfamiliarity with urban living and a lack of industrial skills. But the question of who actually left the South has never been investigated in detail. Although numerous investigations document a flight from rural southern areas to southern cities prior to the Great Migration, no one has considered whether the same migrants then moved on to northern cities. In 1910 over 600,000 Black workers, or ten percent of the Black work force reported themselves to be engaged in "manufacturing and mechanical pursuits", the federal census category roughly including the entire industrial sector. The Great Migration could easily have been made up entirely of this group and their families. It is perhaps surprising to argue that an employed population could be tempted to move, but an explanation lies in the labor conditions then prevalent in the South. About thirty-five percent of the urban Black population in the South was engaged in skilled trades. Some were from the old artisan class of slavery--blacksmiths, masons, carpenters--which had a monopoly of certain trades, but they were gradually being pushed out by competition, mechanization, and obsolescence. The remaining sixty-five percent, more recently urbanized, worked in newly developed industries--tobacco, lumber, coal and iron manufacture, and railroads. Wages in the South, however, were low, and Black workers were aware, through labor recruiters and the Black press, that they could earn more even as unskilled workers in the North than they could as artisans in the South. After the boll weevil infestation, urban Black workers faced competition from the continuing influx of both Black and White rural workers, who were driven to undercut the wages formerly paid for industrial jobs. Thus, a move north would be seen as advantageous to a group that was already urbanized and steadily employed, and the easy conclusion tying their subsequent economic problems in the North to their rural backgrounds comes into question.

单选题If you want to sell a car about $ 80,000, you' d better set the price at ______.

单选题Margaret Mead suggests that

单选题Few people would defend the Victorian attitude to children, but if you were a parent in those days, at least you knew where you stood: children were to be seen and not heard. Freud and his company did away with all that and parents have been bewildered ever since. The child's happiness is all-important, the psychologists say, but what about the parents' happiness? Parents suffer continually from fear and guilt while their children gaily romp about pulling the place apart. A good "old-fashioned" spanking is out of the question: no modern child-rearing manual would permit such barbarity. The trouble is you are not allowed even to shout. Who knows what deep psychological wounds you might inflict? The poor child may never recover from the dreadful traumatic experience. So it is that parents bend over backwards to avoid giving their children complexes which a hundred years ago hadn't even been heard of. Certainly a child needs love, and a lot of it. But the excessive permissiveness of modern parents is surely doing more harm than good. Psychologists have succeeded in undermining parents' confidence in their own authority. And it hasn't taken children long to get wind of the fact. In addition to the great modern classics on child-care, there are countless articles in magazines and newspapers. With so much unsolicited advice flying about, mum and dad just don't know what to do any more. In the end, they do nothing at all. So, from early childhood, the kids are in charge and parents' lives are regulated according to the needs of their offspring. When the little dears develop into teenagers, they take complete control. Lax authority over the years makes adolescent rebellion against parents all the more violent. If the young people are going to have a party, for instance, parents are asked to leave the house. Their presence merely spoils the fun. What else can the poor parents do but obey? Children are hardy creatures (far hardier than the psychologists would have us believe) and most of them survive the harmful influence of extreme permissiveness which is the normal condition in the modern household. But a great many do not. The spread of juvenile delinquency in our own age is largely due to parental laxity. Mother, believing that little Johnny can look after himself, is not at home when he returns from school, so little Johnny roams the streets. The dividing-line between permissiveness and sheer negligence is very fine indeed. The psychologists have much to answer for. They should keep their mouths shut and let parents get on with the job. And if children are knocked about a little bit in the process, it may not really matter too much. At least this will help them to develop vigorous views of their own and give them something positive to react against. Perhaps there's some truth in the idea that children who have had a surfeit of happiness in .their childhood appear like stodgy puddings and fail .to make a success of life.

单选题Henric Ibsen, author of the play “ A Doll’s House” , in which a pretty, helpless housewife abandons her husband and children to seek a more serious life, would surely have approved. From January 1st, 2008, all public companies in Norway are obliged to ensure that at least 40% of their board directors are women. Most firms have obeyed the law, which was passed in 2003. But about 75 out of the 480 or so companies it affects are still too male for the government’s liking. They will shortly receive a letter informing them that they have until the end of February to act, or face the legal consequences — which could include being dissolved. Before the law was proposed, about 7% of board members in Norway were female, according to the Centre for Corporate Diversity. The number has since jumped to 36%. That is far higher than the average of 9% for big companies across Europe or America’s 15% for the Fortune 500. Norway’s stock exchange and its main business lobby oppose the law, as do many businessmen.” I am against quotas for women or men as a matter of principle,” says Sverre Munck, head of international operations at a media firm. “ Board members of public companies should be chosen solely on the basis of merit and experience,” he says. Several firms have even given up their public status in order to escape the new law. Companies have had to recruit about 1,000 women in four years. Many complain that it has been difficult to find experienced candidates. Because of this, some of the best women have collected as many as 25-35 directorships each, and are known in Norwegian business circles as the “ golden skirts” . One reason for the scarcity is that there are fairly few women in management in Norwegian companies — they occupy around 15% of senior positions. It has been particularly hard for firms in the oil, technology and financial industries to find women with enough experience. Some people worry that their relative lack of experience may keep women quiet on boards, and that in turn could mean that boards might become less able to hold managers to account. Recent history in Norway, however, suggests that the right women can make strong directors. “Women feel more compelled than men to do their homework,” says Ms. Reksten Skaugen, who was voted Norway’s chairman of the year for 2007.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} In the two decades between 1910 and 1930, over ten percent of the Black population of the United States left the South, where the majority of the Black population had been located, and migrated to northern states, with the largest number moving, it is claimed, between 1016 and 1918. It has been frequently assumed, but not proved, that most of the migrants in what has come to be called the Great Migration came from rural areas and were motivated by two concurrent factors: the collapse of cotton industry following boll weevil infestation, which began in 1898, and increased demand in the North for labor following the cessation of European immigration caused by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This assumption has led to the conclusion that the migrants' subsequent lack of economic mobility in the North is tied to rural background, a background that implies unfamiliarity with urban living and a lack of industrial skills. But the question of who actually left the South has never been investigated in detail. Although numerous investigations document a flight from rural southern areas to southern cities prior to the Great Migration, no one has considered whether the same migrants then moved on to northern cities. In 1910 over 600,000 Black workers, or ten percent of the Black work force reported themselves to be engaged in "manufacturing and mechanical pursuits", the federal census category roughly including the entire industrial sector. The Great Migration could easily have been made up entirely of this group and their families. It is perhaps surprising to argue that an employed population could be tempted to move, but an explanation lies in the labor conditions then prevalent in the South. About thirty-five percent of the urban Black population in the South was engaged in skilled trades. Some were from the old artisan class of slavery--blacksmiths, masons, carpenters--which had a monopoly of certain trades, but they were gradually being pushed out by competition, mechanization, and obsolescence. The remaining sixty-five percent, more recently urbanized, worked in newly developed industries--tobacco, lumber, coal and iron manufacture, and railroads. Wages in the South, however, were low, and Black workers were aware, through labor recruiters and the Black press, that they could earn more even as unskilled workers in the North than they could as artisans in the South. After the boll weevil infestation, urban Black workers faced competition from the continuing influx of both Black and White rural workers, who Were driven to undercut the wages formerly paid for industrial jobs. Thus, a move north would be seen as advantageous to a group that was already urbanized and steadily employed, and the easy conclusion tying their subsequent economic problems in the North to their rural backgrounds comes into question. {{B}}Notes:{{/B}} boll weevil infestation 棉铃虫蔓延。cessation 中止，停止。mason 泥瓦匠。recruiter 招募者。influx流入，涌入。

单选题It is nearly 25 years since The Economist cooked up the Big Mac index. It was devised in September 1986 as a fun way to explain "purchasing-power parity", by comparing the prices of hamburgers in different countries. But burgernomics has since provided serious food for thought. Some economists think the Big Mac index has been surprisingly accurate in predicting long-run movements in exchange rates. It has also provided a few hot tips (and some half-baked ones) for investors. When the euro was launched in 1999, almost everybody reckoned it would immediately rise against the dollar. But the Big Mac index suggested that the euro was already overvalued. Soros Fund Management, a prominent hedge fund, later said that it sniffed at the sell smell coming from the Big Mac index, but resisted the temptation to bite. It was cheesed off when the euro promptly fell. Today, our burger barometer suggests that the euro is again overvalued against the other main currencies, and it highlights the euro area's internal problems, showing that Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain have lost competitiveness relative to Germany. Burgernomics is also a handy check on whether governments are understating inflation. It supports claims that Argentina has been cooking the books: over the past decade, Big Mac prices there have, on average, risen by well over ten percentage points more each year than the official consumer-price index—a far bigger gap than in any other country. But bingeing on burgernomics can be unhealthy. American politicians cite the Big Mac index as proof that the yuan is massively undervalued. It is true that burgers are cheap in China, but so they should be in all emerging economies, because wages are much lower. If the index is adjusted for GDP per person, it shows that the yuan is now close to its fair value against the dollar. Studies suggest that the Big Mac index fairly closely tracks the purchasing-power-parity rates calculated by more sophisticated methods. Yet whereas those fancier techniques require researchers to gather thousands of prices in each country and take two years to produce, the Big Mac index relies on a single product, so the results are almost instant. Official economic statistics are published only after a lag and are subject to big revisions. This explains the popularity of some quirky but timely indicators. When Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve, he monitored several unusual measures. One favourite, supposedly, was sales of men's underwear, which are usually pretty constant, but drop in recessions when men replace them less often. The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street is perhaps too prim to inspect men's underpants. Instead, the Bank of England tracks data on internet searches for telltale terms. It has, for example, found that the trend in searches for "estate agents" can be a predictor of house prices.

单选题 When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit. The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, "Progress in Brain Research." Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer's disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful. "It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind." For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it. When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students. "For the young people, it's as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they've retained all this extra data, they're now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they've soaked up from one situation to another." Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others' yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker's real impact.

单选题An old saying has it that half of all advertising budgets are wasted—the trouble is, no one knows which half. In the internet age, at least in theory, this fraction can be much reduced. By watching what people search for, click on and say online, companies can aim "behavioral" ads at those most likely to buy. In the past couple of weeks a quarrel has illustrated the value to advertisers of such fin e-grained information: should advertisers assume that people are happy to be tracked and sent behavioral ads? Or should they have explicit permission? In December 2010 America"s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposed adding a "do not track" (DNT) option to internet browsers, so that users could tell advertisers that they did not want to be followed. Microsoft"s Internet Explorer and Apple"s Safari both offer DNT; Google"s Chrome is due to do so this year. In February the FTC and Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) agreed that the industry would get cracking on responding to DNT requests. On May 31st Microsoft set off the row: It said that Internet Explorer 10, the version due to appear in Windows 8, would have DNT as a default. Advertisers are horrified. Human nature being what it is, most people stick with default settings. Few switch DNT on now, but if tracking is off it will stay off. Bob Liodice, the chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, one of the groups in the DAA, says consumers will be worse off if the industry cannot collect information about their preferences. "People will not get fewer ads," he says. "They"ll get less meaningful, less targeted ads." It is not yet clear how advertisers will respond. Getting a DNT signal does not oblige anyone to stop tracking, although some companies have promised to do so. Unable to tell whether someone really objects to behavioral ads or whether they are sticking with Microsoft"s default, some may ignore a DNT signal and press on anyway. Also unclear is why Microsoft has gone it alone. After all, it has an ad business too, which it says will comply with DNT requests, though it is still working out how. If it is trying to upset Google, which relies almost wholly on advertising, it has chosen an indirect method: there is no guarantee that DNT by default will become the norm. DNT does not seem an obviously huge selling point for Windows 8—though the firm has compared some of its other products favorably with Google"s on that count before. Brendon Lynch, Microsoft"s chief privacy officer, blogged: "we believe consumers should have more control." Could it really be that simple?

单选题In a rare unanimous ruling, the US Supreme Court has overturned the corruption conviction of a former Virginia governor, Robert McDonnell. But it did so while holding its nose at the ethics of his conduct , which included accepting gifts such as a Rolex watch and a Ferrari automobile from a company seeking access to government. The high court"s decision said the judge in Mr. McDonnell"s trail failed to tell a jury that it must look only at his "official acts," or the former governor"s decisions on "specific" and "unsettled" issues related to his duties. Merely helping a gift-giver gain access to other officials, unless done with clear intent to pressure those officials, is not corruption, the justices found. The court did suggest that accepting favors in return for opening doors is "distasteful" and "nasty." But under anti-bribery laws, proof must be made of concrete benefits, such as approval of a contract or regulation. Simply arranging a meeting, making a phone call, or hosting an event is not an "official act." The court"s ruling is legally sound in defining a kind of favoritism that is not criminal. Elected leaders must be allowed to help supporters deal with bureaucratic problems without fear of prosecution for bribery. "The basic compact underlying representative government," wrote Chief Justice John Robert for the court, "assumes that public officials will hear from their constituents and act on their concerns." But the ruling reinforces the need for citizens and their elected representatives, not the courts, to ensure equality of access to government. Officials must not be allowed to play favorites in providing information or in arranging meetings simply because an individual or group provides a campaign donation or a personal gift. This type of integrity requires well-enforced laws in government transparency, such as records of official meetings, rules on lobbying, and information about each elected leader"s sources of wealth. Favoritism in official access can fan public perceptions of corruption. But it is not always corruption. Rather officials must avoid double standards, or different types of access for average people and the wealthy. If connections can be bought, a basic premise of democratic society—that all are equal in treatment by government—is undermined. Good governance rests on an understanding of the inherent worth of each individual. The court"s ruling is a step forward in the struggle against both corruption and official favoritism.