单选题When mentioning "the something-for-nothing days" (Paragraph l), the writer is talking about

单选题Although it is the elderly and the young infants who get the siekest from the flu, it is young children who are most susceptible. In community flu outbreaks, it is not unusual for 30 to 40 percent of children to get the infection, perhaps twice the rate of adult infection. Flu spreads rapidly from child to child for a number of reasons. First, flu is spread by small respiratory droplets that are coughed or sneezed and float in the air. A well child can catch the flu from being in the same classroom or child care center with an ill child without them ever touching each other. (Contrast this with the way colds are usually spread, by large droplets on people"s hands, making good hand washing an effective preventive strategy. )Also, flu appears to be contagious even the clay before symptoms begin, and because children don"t get as sick as adults with the flu, they other stay in school or clay-care long enough to spread the disease to their classmates. While few otherwise healthy children have any serious consequences from the flu, it is these children that are the major conduit by which flu spreads through the community and into households. In ordinary households, adults are more frequently infected by children than by other adults. And it is adults with chronic diseases, and the elderly—particularly grandparents—that suffer the major consequences of this virus. One author has aptly referred to children as the "Typhoid Mary"s" of the flu. Flu Vaccine is the best defense against the flu. It is recommended for all adults over the age of 65, or over the age of 50 if there are sufficient supplies, and for individuals of any age if they are at high risk. Those high risk individuals would include anyone with heart or lung disease, including asthma, and people with diabetes, chronic kidney disease or other chronic conditions. But recognizing that it is children who spread flu to households, it can be strongly argued to offer flu vaccine to healthy children who are in regular contact with other fanfily members who are at high risk by virtue of their age or underlying illnesses. This will help keep flu out of these households. Even if the grandparent has had flu vaccine, immunizing the grandchildren makes sense because flu vaccine is more reliably protective in younger healthier individuals. In addition, there are about 8 million children in the U. S. who have underlying conditions—most notably asthma—that make them eligible for flu vaccine. Regrettably, three out of four of these children end up ever getting the flu vaccine.

单选题When it comes to suing doctors, Philadelphia is hardly the city of brotherly love. A combination of sprightly lawyers and sympathetic juries has made Philadelphia a hotspot for medical-malpractice lawsuits. Since 1995, Pennsylvania state courts have awarded an average of $ 2m in such cases, according to Jury Verdict Research, a survey firm. Some medical specialists have seen their malpractice insurance premiums nearly double over the past year. Obstetricians are now paying up to $ 104,000 a year to protect themselves. The insurance industry is largely to blame. Carol Golin, the Monitor's editor, argues that in the 1990s insurers tried to grab market share by offering artificially low rates (betting that any losses would be covered by gains on their investments). The stock-market correction, coupled with the large legal awards, has eroded the insurers' reserves. Three in Pennsylvania alone have gone bust. A few doctors -- particularly older ones --- will quit. The rest are adapting. Some are abandoning litigation-prone procedures, such as delivering babies. Others are moving parts of their practice to neighboring states where insurance rates are lower. Some from Pennsylvania have opened offices in New Jersey. New doctors may also be deterred from setting up shop in litigation havens, however prestigious. Despite a Republican president, tort reform has got nowhere at the federal level. Indeed doctors could get clobbered indirectly by a Patients' Bill of Rights, which would further expose managed care companies to lawsuits. This prospect has fuelled interest among doctors in Pennsylvania's new medical malpractice reform bill, which was signed into law on March 20th. It will, among other things, give doctors $ 40m of state funds to offset their insurance premiums, spread the payment of awards out over time and prohibit individuals from double-dipping that is, suing a doctor for damages that have already been paid by their health insurer. But will it really help? Randall Bovbjerg, a health policy expert at the Urban Institute, argues that the only proper way to slow down the litigation machine would be to limit the compensation for pain and suffering, so-called "non-monetary damages". Needless to say, a fixed cap on such awards is resisted by most trial lawyers. But Mr Bovbjerg reckons a more nuanced approach, with a sliding scale of payments based on well-defined measures of injury, is a better way forward. In the meantime, doctors and insurers are bracing themselves for a couple more rough years before the insurance cycle turns. Nobody disputes that hospital staff make mistakes: a 1999 Institute of Medicine report claimed that errors kill at least 44,000 patients a year. But there is little evidence that malpractice lawsuits on their own will solve the problem.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The Tuscan town of Vinci, birthplace of Leonardo and home to a museum of his machines, should fittingly put on a show of the television-robot sculptures of Nam Jun Paik. This Korean-born American artist and the Renaissance master are kindred spirits: Leonardo saw humanistic potential in his scientific experiments, Mr Paik endeavors to harness media technology for artistic purp9ses. A pioneer of video art in the late 1960s, he treats television as a space for art images and as material for robots and interactive sculptures. Mr Paik was not alone. He and fellow artists picked on the video cameras because they offered an easy way to record their performance art. Now, to mark video art's coming of age, New York's Museum of Modern Art is looking back at their efforts in a film series called "The First Decade". It celebrates the early days of video by screening the archives of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world's leading distributors of video and new media art, founded 30 years ago. One of EAI's most famous alumni is Bill Viola. Part of the second generation of video artists, who emerged in the 1970s, Mr Viola experimented with video’s expressive potential. His camera explores religious ritual and universal ideas. The Viola show at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin shows us moving-image frescoes that cover the gallery walls and envelop the viewer in all-embracing cycles of life and death. One new star is a Californian, Doug Aitken, who took over London's Serpentine Gallery last October with an installation called "New Ocean". Some say Mr Aitken is to video what Jackson Pollock was to painting. He drips his images from floor to ceiling, creating sequences of rooms in which the Space surrounds the viewer in hallucinatory images, of sound and light. At the Serpentine, Mr Aitken created a collage of moving images, on the theme of water's flow around the planet as a force of life. "I wanted to create a new topography in this work, a liquid image, to show a world that never stands still," he says. The boundary between the physical world and the world of images and information, he thinks, is blurring. The interplay of illusion and reality, sound and image, references to art history, politics, film and television in this art form that is barely 30 years old can make video art difficult to define. Many call it film-based or moving-image art to include artists who work with other cinematic media. At its best, the appeal of video art lies in its versatility, its power to capture the passing of time and on its ability to communicate both inside and outside gallery walls.

单选题According to the text, what role has English played during the process of globalization?

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{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Much of the American anxiety about old age is a flight from the reality of death. One of the striking qualities of the American character is the unwillingness to face either the fact or meaning of death. In the more somber tradition of American literature-from Hawthorne and Melville and Poe to Faulkner and Hemingway—one finds a tragic depth that belies the surface thinness of the ordinary American death attitudes. By an effort of the imagination, the great writers faced problems that the culture in action is reluctant to face—the fact of death, its mystery, and its place in. the back-and-forth shuttling of the eternal recurrence. The unblinking confrontation of death in Greek time, the elaborate theological patterns woven around it in the Middle Ages, the ritual celebration of it in the rich, peasant cultures of Latin and Slavic Europe and in primitive cultures; these are difficult to find in American life. Whether through fear of the emotional depths, or because of a drying up of the sluices of religious intensity, the American avoids dwelling on death or even corning to terms with it; he finds it morbid and recoils from it, surrounding it with word avoidance (Americans never die; they "pass away,") and various taboos of speech and practice. A "funeral parlor" is decorated to look like a bank; everything in a funeral ceremony is done in hushed tones, as if it were something furtive, to be concealed from the world; there is so much emphasis on being dignified that the ceremony often loses its quality of dignity. In some of the primitive cultures, there is difficulty in understanding the muses of death; it seems puzzling and even unintelligible. Living in a scientific culture, Americans have a ready enough explanation of how it comes, yet they show little capacity to come to terms with the fact of death itself and with the grief that accompanies it. "We jubilate over birth and dance at weddings", writes Margaret Mead, "but more and more hustle the death off the scene without ceremony, without an opportunity for young and old to realize that death is as much a fact of life as is birth". And one may add, even in its hurry and brevity, the last stage of an American' s life—the last occasion of this relation to his society—is as standardized as the rest.

单选题The contents of "people column" in The New York Times include

单选题When mentioning "the government accepts a figure of about 300,000", the writer is trying to illustrate ______.

单选题What does the author probably mean by "the sizzle, not the steak" (Line 6, Paragraph 5) ?

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} The protection of cultural diversity from a political and economic point of view in fact became pressing with globalization, which is characterized by the liberalization on a large scale of economic and commercial exchange, and thus, what has been called the commodification of culture. It has been noted, for instance, that over the past 20 years, trade in cultural goods has quadrupled and the new international rules (WTO, OECD) on trade are increasingly removing State support and protection measures in favour of national goods and services in the name of market freedom and free trade. For those in favour of the promotion of cultural diversity, which includes Canada, France and the Group of 77 (group of developing countries), the aim is above all to obtain from the United States the guarantee that the “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions”, signed by UNESCO in November 2005, would not be subordinated to international trade instruments. Indeed, for the United States and other supporters of free trade, the convention is a had idea and the measures referred to above stem quite simply from an interventionist conception of the State which is not likely to favour the market. Subsidies to cultural enterprises, the imposition of broadcast quotas and restrictions on foreign ownership of the media would, for them, interfere with the natural development of the market. In addition, even though it is not official, the convention on cultural diversity is for many Americans an attempt to undermine the global supremacy of their audiovisual industries. If the general understanding of cultural diversity is based mainly on binary distinctions such as modern culture/local culture, the reality of cultural diversity is not binary, but stems from respect for and acceptance of differences, dialogue, and the quest for shared values, in order to leave behind the monologism that is a feature of the information society. In this setting, diversity is consequently a way of approaching the structure of how we live together, based on the acceptance of a plural vision of the world. We can see then that cultural diversity is perceived here as the integration, rather than the superposition or juxtaposition of cultures and that the information society in which it is expressed is above all a society of shared knowledge.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} A few milliamps of electricity can cause plants to increase synthesis of chemicals. These compounds often also have a pharmacological (related to medicine) or commercial value, so the trick could be used to help increase yields of commercially useful biologicals. Artemisinic acid, from sweet wormwood, for example, is used in malarial medications, and shikonin (紫草素), from the purple gromwell plant, is used against skin infections. Researchers have long known that stressing plants can force them to take defensive action, often ramping up the production of protective chemicals that, for example, make them more resistant to insect attack. It has become common practice to stress such plants into increasing their yields. This is usually clone using physical stress elicitors (诱导子), including bits of the micro-organisms that normally attack the plants, or irritants made from metallic compounds such as copper chloride. These are effective, but they come at a cost. Most elicitors are toxic to plants and can build up in tissues, making it necessary to occasionally "clean" a plant of the chemicals so they keep having the same effect. Recently, research groups at the University of Arizona in Tucson found that the application of an electric current to the hairy roots of the poisonous herb Hyoscyamus muticus stimulated the production of the herb's toxin hyoscyamine (天仙子胺). This unpublished finding inspired Hans Van Etten, also of the University of Arizona, and his colleagues to test sub-lethal levels of electrical currents on other plants, to assess electricity's potential to elevate chemical production. The researchers exposed eight different plant species (ranging from Japanese pagoda tree seedlings to pea plants) to weak electrical currents of 30 milliamps. Seven of the plants increased their production o{ defensive chemicals. The average boost of chemical production was 20 times, they report in Biotechnology Progress. One plant, a type of alfalfa, increased its chemical yield by 168 times. These values are very similar to those achieved using chemical elicitors, and seem to have no lethal effects-just a negative effect on growth. The treatment can be used over and over again without the build-up of any unwanted material. The useful compounds would be very easy to harvest: they simply pour out into solution if the plants are grown hydroponically. "The fact that we can use electricity instead of toxic materials to elicit chemical production is very exciting because it means we get to look at how these chemicals form without having to constantly add and remove toxins from the system," says Van Etten. "This is a really novel and creative approach that I've never seen before," says plant metabolic engineer Fabricio Medina Bolivar from Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. "The possibilities for using electricity with plants in this way are absolutely tremendous. "

单选题In which aspect are the Universities superior to the University Colleges and Institutes?______