单选题According to Benjamin Radford, the real danger to the public opinions lies in

单选题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 the 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 bottle-necks 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 population affect the wages of the top half. If the bottom half can"t effectively staff the processes that have to he operated, the management and professional jobs that go with these processes will disappear.

单选题Rebel uprising kills seventy! Plane crash leaves no survivors! Rock star dies of overdose! Evening newscasts and metropolitan newspapers scream the bad news, the sensational, and the action. Audiences of today focus upon the sensational action, the violence, the loss, the terror. Individually, our lives are redirected, our worlds reshaped, and our images changed. While wary of the danger of change, we human beings surrender daily to exploitation of values, opportunities, and sensitivity. The evolution has brought us to the point that we believe little of what is presented to us as good and valuable; instead, we opt for suspicion and disbelief, demanding proof and something for nothing. Therein lies the danger for the writer seeking to break into the market of today. Joumalists sell sensationalism. The journalist who loses sight of the simple truth and opts only for the sensation loses the audience over the long run. Only those seeking a short-term thrill are interested in following the joumalistic thinking. How, then do we capture the audience of today and hold it, when the competition for attention is so fierce? The answer is writing to convey action, and the way to accomplish this is a simple one-action verbs. The writer whose product suspends time for the reader or viewer is the successful writer whose work is sought and reread. Why? Time often will melt away in the face of the reality of life's little responsibilities for the reader. Instead of puzzling over a more active and more accurate verb, some joumalists often limp through passive voice and useless tense to squeeze the life out of an action-filled world and fill their writing with missed opportunities to appeal to the reader who seeks that moment of suspended time. Recently, a reporter wrote about observing the buildings in a community robbed by rebel uprising as "thousands of bullet holes were in the hotel. " A very general observation. Suppose he had written, "The hotel was pocked with bullet holes. " The visual image conjured up by the latter is far superior to the former. Here is the reader.., comfortable in the easy chair before the fire with the dog at his feet. The verb "pocked" speaks to him. The journalist missed the opportunity to convey the reality.

单选题In the eyes of visitors from the outside world______

单选题What does the word "patrician" mean in the second sentence of the second paragraph?

单选题"Worse than useless," fumed Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman from California, on March 19th, when the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Terrible, and getting worse," added Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic colleague who has kept a watchful eye on the INS for ten years. Committee members lined up to take swings at James Ziglar, the head of the INS. He explained, somewhat pathetically, that "outdated procedures" had kept the visa-processing wheels grinding slowly through a backlog of applications. He also had some new rules in mind to tighten up visas. Speeding up the paperwork and getting more of it on to computers--is vital, but the September attacks have exposed the tension, between the agency's two jobs: on the one hand enforcing the security of America's borders, and on the other granting privileges such as work permits to foreigners. But other people want more radical changes. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, wants to split the INS into two separate bodies, one dealing with border security and the other with handling benefits to immigrants. The other approach, favored in the White House, is to treat the two functions as complementary, and to give the INS even more responsibility for security. Under that plan, the INS would merge with the Customs Service, which monitors the 20m shipments of goods brought into America every year, as well as the bags carried in by some 500m visitors. The two agencies would form one large body within the Department of Justice, the current home of the INS. This would cut out some of the duplicated effort at borders, where customs officers and agents from the INS's Border Patrol often rub shoulders but do not work together. Mr Bush--who has said that the news of the visa approvals left him "plenty hot" --was expected to give his approval. The senate, however, may not be quite so keen. The Justice Department could have trouble handling such a merger, let alone taking on the considerable economic responsibilities of the Customs Service, which is currently part of the Treasury. The senate prefers yet another set of security recommendations, including links between the databases of different agencies that hold security and immigration information, and scanners at ports of entry to check biometric data recorded on immigration documents. These ideas are embodied in a bill sponsored by members of both parties, but are currently held up by Robert Byrd, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who worries that there has not been enough debate on the subject. Mr Ziglar, poor chap, may feel there has been more than enough.

单选题Shopping goods that are considered as basically the same are those ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Advertising sells its products by offering seductive promises of youth, beauty, health, money, ease, romance, better lifestyle, even time. There's no logical connection between a car and a cougar, but the image is powerful and presented with sophistication. We buy it and we may well buy the product. When it comes to advertising, let the buyer beware. There are several less-than-candid techniques which advertisers use to get our attention. A product may be filmed or photographed in such a way to make it appear bigger, better, or more luscious. A product may be presented as being "unique", "one-of-a-kind", or "supreme", when in fact it's identical to other products on the market. A product may claim to be "new" or "improved" when only an insignificant change has been made. Finally, an advertiser may offer distorted truths or even tell outright lies. It takes a while for the government or the competition to catch up with false claims in advertising. Meanwhile, the public has been led to believe that a mouth wash can cure the common cold, or that bee pollen retards aging in human skin. The consumer's best defense is awareness. He can listen to, but not learn, the emotional message broadcast by the ad. He can distinguish between what the ad pretends to offer and what it is really selling. A face cream, for example, can only do so much. It can reduce dryness and provide temporary smoothness and moisture to the skin. But it is made in a factory, not in a magician's study. It cannot turn back the clock.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of pre-industrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions. The first of these asserts that residents of early modern England moved regularly about their countryside: migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover" Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English—they would rather have stayed home—by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that. contrary to the notion that used to flourish in American history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably. Bailyn's third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to pre-industrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited: by the 1730's. however. American employers demanded skilled workers. Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of the Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true. as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws. built a distinguished university, and published books? Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture. Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they gave up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus.it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic. {{B}}Notes:{{/B}} spillover n. 外流。indentured servant 合同工。hinterland n. 内地。Anglo-American 英裔美国人的。 periphery n. 边缘。anti-aristocratic 反对贵族的。demographics 人口统计(特点)。

单选题As a related study describes, Twitter has come to play a crucial role in the way that news functions during events like the Egyptian revolution—like an overloaded newswire filled with everything from breaking news to rumor and everything in between. The evolution of what media theorist Jeff Jarvis and others have called "networked journalism" has made the business of news much more chaotic, since it now consists of thousands of voices instead of just a few prominent ones who happen to have the tools to make themselves heard. If there is a growth area in media, it is in the field of "curated news," where real-time filters verify and redistribute the news that comes in from tens of thousands of sources, and use tools like Storify to present a coherent picture of what is happening on the ground. One of the additional points the study makes is that the personal Twitter accounts belonging to journalists were far more likely to be retweeted or engaged with by others than official accounts for the media outlets they worked for. The point here is one we have tried to make repeatedly: Social media are called social for a reason. They're about human beings connecting with other human beings around an event, and the more that media outlets try to stifle the human aspect of these tools—through repressive social-media policies, for example—the less likely they will be to benefit from using them. Another benefit of a distributed or networked version of journalism is one sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has made in the course of her research into how Twitter and other social tools affected the events in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. As she wrote in a recent blog post, one of the realities of mainstream media is what is often called "pack journalism": the kind that sees hundreds of journalists show up for official briefings by government or military sources, but few pursue their own stories outside the official' sphere. Tufekci says social media and "citizen journalism" can be a powerful antidote to this kind of process, and that's fundamentally a positive force for journalism. As we look at the way news and information flows in this new world of social networks, and what Andy Carvin has called "random acts of journalism" by those who may not even see themselves as journalists, it's easy to get distracted by how chaotic the process seems, and how difficult it is to separate the signal from the noise. But more information is better—even if it requires new skills on the part of journalists when it comes to filtering that information—and journalism, as Jay Rosen has pointed out, tends to get better when more people do it. (454 words)

单选题Miss Page's attitude toward Black Friday is

单选题Picture-taking is a technique both for reflecting the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer's temperament, discovering itself through the camera's cropping of reality. That is, photography has two directly opposite ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of fearlessness, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all. These conflicting ideals arise from uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture. Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as observer is attracting because it implicitly denies that picture- taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed. An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography's means. Whatever are the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression just like painting, its originality is closely linked to the power of a machine. The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton's high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke. But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limit imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident. For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing". Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast. This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past when images had a handmade quality. This longing for some primitive state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers. Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness.

单选题 The economic debate in the U.S. regarding the fiscal stimulus package centered on "bang for the buck," that is, on whether tax cuts or spending increases would produce more jobs. This limited perspective is very misleading, however: the choice of spending versus taxes should turn first and foremost on the purposes of government, or what economists call "the allocation of resources." It's silly to debate whether investing in a $1OO-million bridge creates more jobs than a $1OO-million tax cut if we need the bridge! The American Society of Civil Engineers has long documented the crumbling state of U.S. infrastructure and the pressing need for $2.2 trillion in investments for our well-being and competitiveness. Government spending and taxation affect the distribution of income demographically and temporally. America ranks 22nd out of 23 high-income countries in public social outlays as a percentage of national income for health, pensions, income support and other social services. Our political discourse tends to focus on the middle class and neglect the poor, whereas our tax and spending policies often benefit the wealthy. As a result, the U.S. has the largest poverty rate, income inequality and per-capita prison population of any high-income nation, as well as the worst health conditions.. The timing of tax cuts and spending increases also affects the well-being of today's generation versus future ones. The U.S. has a chronic fiscal deficit because federal taxation is enough to cover only five types of federal programs: retirement and disability, medical care, veterans' programs, defense and homeland security, and interest on the public debt. All other federal outlays are in effect funded by borrowing. The chronic deficit problem, now at least 5 percent of GNP (Gross National Product), will tend to get much worse as the population ages and health care costs rise, until we finally choose to tax ourselves adequately to pay for the government we need and want. Temporary deficits can boost the economy in a recession, although temporary income tax cuts and rebates tend to be saved rather than spent. Prolonged deficit spending, however, would impose future burdens. The most obvious will be the need to service the public debts owed to China and other holders of treasury bills-the U.S. is on a path to multiply its already massive international debts. Less obviously, the huge budget deficits will crowd out some private investment spending and exports as the economy recovers. Higher taxes needed to cover the service on that debt will not only squeeze consumption but may also distort the economy through disincentives on saving, work or other activities.

单选题According to the text, the dollar

单选题In studying both the recurrence of special habits or ideas in several districts, and their prevalence within each district, there come before us ever-repeated proofs of regular causation producing the phenomena of human life, and of laws of maintenance and diffusion conditions of society, at definite stages of culture. But, while giving full importance to the evidence bearing on these standard conditions of society, let us be careful to avoid a pitfall which may entrap the unwary student. Of course the opinions and habits belonging in common to masses of mankind are to a great extent the results of sound judgment and practical wisdom. But to a great extent it is not so. That many numerous societies of men should have believed in the influence of the evil eye and the existence of a firmament, should have sacrificed slaves and goods to the ghosts of the departed, should have handed down traditions of giants slaying monsters and men turning into beast--all this is ground for holding that such ideas were indeed produced in men's minds by efficient causes, but it is not ground for holding that the rites in question are profitable, the beliefs sound, and the history authentic. This may seem at the first glance a truism, but, in fact, it is the denial of a fallacy which deeply affects the minds of all but a small critical minority of mankind. Popularly, what everybody says must be true, what everybody does must be right--"Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est, hoc est vere proprieque Catholicum' --and m forth. There are various topics, especially in history, law, philosophy, and theology, where even the educated people we live among can hardly be brought to see that the cause why men do hold an opinion, or practise a custom, is by no means necessarily a reason why they ought to do so. Now collections of ethnographic evidence bringing so prominently into view the agreement of immense multitudes of men as to certain traditions, beliefs, and usages, are peculiarly liable to be thus improperly used in direct defense of these institutions themselves, even old barbaric nations being polled to maintain their opinions against what are called modern ideas. As it has more than once happened to myself to find my collections of traditions and beliefs thus set up to prove their own objective truth, without proper examination of the grounds on which they were actually received, I take this occasion of remarking that the same line of argument will serve equally well to demonstrate, by the strong and wide consent of nations, that the earth is flat, and nightmare the visit of a demon.