单选题Hominids started walking on two legs six million years ago, shortly after diverging from chimpanzees, according to a study of the inner structure of a fossilised thighbone. The finding puts upright posture at the base of the human family tree. The evolution of upright posture is a key issue in anthropology. Together with large brain size, it marks the dividing line between humans and the great apes. Researchers know that upright posture evolved first because the skeleton of famed Australopithecine，Lucy, has a small braincase but modem ankles. Yet with few known fossils older than about four million years, the details of how and when upright posture evolved have been hazy. Over the past few years, however, two important new finds have begun to fill in the gaps. The older animal is Sahelanthropus tchadensis, which lived in Chad six to seven million years ago, but only its hominid cranium was found. More complete is the chimpanzee-sized Orrorin tugenensis, as 20 fossils from at least five individuals have been found in Kenya. These are about six million years old. A team led by Brigitte Senut of the French Museum of Natural History in Paris initially classed Orrorin as a hominid, on the human side of the split from chimpanzees. This classification was based on skeletal features, but other anthropologists remained sceptical. To address those doubts, Robert Eckhardt of Pennsylvania State University in the US carried out a CT scan on the most complete of Orrorin's three thighbones. He hoped that revealing its internal structure would indicate the biomechanical use of the bone. The critical part of each thighbone—which consists of a strong outer cortex and a spongy core—is the neck shaft that connects the top part of bone with the hip joint. Essentially, the thighbones are supporting a horizontal pelvic beam that takes the weight of the head and body. The precise load this places on the thighbones depends on body posture, and this determines the musculature and structure of the thighbones. In knuckle-walking chimps, the cortex is the same thickness on the top and bottom of the bone. However, bipedal, upright walking applies different forces, which means the codex in humans is at least four times thicker on the bottom part of the bone. Fossilisation usually obscures the internal structures of bones, so " there aren't many hominids in which scanning will work " , Eckhardt told New Scientist. However, with Orrorin he was lucky. He and a research group including Senut found that the lower part of the thighbone in Orrorin is three times thicker than the upper—making its walking habits much closer to humans than chimps.

单选题In contrast to Britain, France is funding their medical care

单选题It never rains but it pours . Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and improved their feeble corporation governance, a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity. Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss"s agenda in businesses of every variety. Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organizations as diverse as Time Warner, the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities. "Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset," says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University"s business school. "The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value, which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders." Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), perhaps it is time for GASP, Generally Accepted Security Practices, suggested Eli Noam of New York"s Columbia Business School. "Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy, and recovery is a management issue, not a technical one," he says. The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss. Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands. The current state of affairs may have been encouraged—though not justified—by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage. Until California recently passed a law, American firms did not have to tell anyone, even the victim, when data went astray. That may change fast: lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D.C..Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America, disclosed on June 17th, overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America"s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.

单选题Immigration brings economic benefits in that

单选题The Belgian blue is an ugly but tasty cow that has 40% more muscle than it should have. It is the product of random mutation followed by selective breeding —as, indeed, are all domesticated creatures. But where an old art has led, a new one may follow. By understanding which genetic changes have been consolidated in the Belgian blue, it may be possible to design and build similar versions of other species using genetic engineering as a short-cut . And that is precisely what Terry Bradley, a fish biologist at the University of Rhode Island, is trying to do. Instead of cattle, he is doing it in trout . His is one of two projects that may soon put the first biotech animals on the dinner table. The other project is led by Aqua Bounty. It is one thing to make such fish, of course. It is quite another to get them to market. First, it is necessary to receive the approval of the regulators. In America, the relevant regulator is the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA), which Aqua Bounty says it has been petitioning for more than a decade and which published guidelines for approving genetically engineered animals in 2009. Aqua Bounty has now filed its remaining studies for approval, and hopes to hear the result this year. Dr Bradley has not yet applied for approval. The FDA is concerned mainly with the healthfulness of what people put in their mouths, and it seems unlikely that the new procedures will yield something that is unsafe to eat. But what happens if the creatures escape and start breeding in the wild? For that to be a problem, the modified fish would have to be better at surviving and reproducing than those honed by millions of years of natural selection. On the face of it, this seems unlikely, because the characteristics that have been engineered into them are ones designed to make them into better food, rather than lean, mean breeding machines. But there is a chink in this argument. As Mark Abrahams, a biologist at Memorial University in Newfoundland, points out, it is not just the fish that have been modified by man, but also the environment in which they could escape. Many of the creatures that eat salmon and trout, such as bears and some birds, have had their ranks thinned by human activity. Dr Abrahams thinks it possible that fast-growing salmon could displace the natural sort in places where predators are rare. Aqua Bounty is addressing such concerns by subjecting developing eggs to high pressures. The result, if all goes well, will be that animals follow plants down the biotech route. Whether people will actually want to buy or eat the new fish is a different matter— though they buy the meat of Belgian blue cattle at a premium . Perhaps clever marketing could make "double-muscled" fish into a premium product, too . If people will pay extra for meat from a monstrosity like the Belgian blue, anything is possible.

单选题As used in the third sentence of the second paragraph, the word "utter" means ______.

单选题Simply flipping through a book may not seem like the best way to scan it, but a Japanese research group at Tokyo University has created new software that allows hundreds of pages to be scanned within minutes. Scanning paper is normally a tedious process with each page having to be inserted into a flatbed scanner, but the team led by professor Masatoshi Ishikawa use a high speed camera that takes 500 pictures a second to scan pages as they are flipped. Normal scanners can only scan the information that is actually before them on the page. The new scanner being developed is able to deal with the fact that pages that are being flipped are normally deformed in some fashion. "It takes a shot of the shape, then it calculates the shape and uses those calculations to film the scanning," Ishikawa said, explaining the system used to reconstruct the original page. "As it can film while understanding the underlying shape, it's very easy to then take the pages that are being scanned and save them as a normal flat copy." The current system is able to scan an average 200～250 page book in a little over 60 seconds using basic computer hardware that is available off-the-shelf. While it now requires extra time to process the scanned images, the researchers hope to eventually make the technology both faster and much smaller. "In the more distant future, once it becomes possible to put all of this processing on one chip and then put that in an iPad or iPod, one could scan just using that chip. At that point, it becomes possible to scan something quickly to save for later reading," Ishikawa said. Being able to scan books with an iPhone may be further off, but Ishikawa says that a commercial version of the large-scale computer based scanning system could be available in two to three years. While the technology has the potential to take paper books into the digital age, it remains to be how publishers will react to people scanning their books while just flipping through them.

单选题"In the long run," as John Maynard Keynes observed, "we are all dead. " True. But can the (1) run be elongated in a way that makes the long run (2) ? And if so, how, and at what cost? People have dreamt of (3) since time immemorial. They have sought it since the first alchemist put an elixir of (4) on the same shopping list as a way to turn lead into gold. They have (5) about it in fiction, from Rider Haggard's "She" to Frank Herbert's "Dune". And now, with the growth of (6) knowledge that has marked the past few decades, a few researchers believe it might be within (7) . To think about the question, it is important to understand why organisms-people (8) -age in the first place. People are like machines: they (9) That much is obvious. However, a machine can always be (10) A good mechanic with a stock of spare parts can keep it going (11) . Eventually, no part of the (12) may remain, but it still carries on, like Lincoln's famous axe that had three new handles and two new blade. The question, of course, is whether the machine is worth (13) . It is here that people and nature (14) . Or, to put it slightly (15) , two bits of nature disagree with each other. From the individual's point of view, (16) is an imperative. You cannot reproduce unless you are alive. A fear of death is a sensible evolved response and, since (17) is a sure way of dying, it is no surprise that people want to stop it in its tracks. Moreover, even the appearance of ageing can be (18) . It (19) the range of potential sexual partners who find you attractive-since it is a sign that you are not going to be (20) all that long to help bring up baby-and thus, again, curbs your reproduction.

单选题The case of Samsung Electronics demonstrates that

单选题In the past, American colleges and universities were created to serve a dual purpose to advance learning and to offer a chance to become familiar with bodies of knowledge already discovered to those who wished it. To create and to impart, these were the distinctive features of American higher education prior to the most recent, disorderly decades of the twentieth century. The successful institution of higher learning had never been one whose mission could be defined in terms of providing vocational skills or as a strategy for resolving societal problems. In a subtle way Americans believed higher education to be useful, but not necessarily of immediate use. Another purpose has now been assigned to the mission of American colleges and universities. Institutions of higher learning--public or private--commonly face the challenge of defining their programs in such a way as to contribute to the service of the community. This service role has various applications. Most common are programs to meet the demands of regional employment markets, to provide opportunities for upward social and economic mobility, to achieve racial, ethnic, or social integration, or more generally to produce "productive" as compared to " educated" graduates. Regardless of its precise definition, the idea of a service-university has won acceptance within the academic community. One need only be reminded of the change in language describing the two-year college to appreciate the new value currently being attached to the concept of a service-related university. The traditional two-year college has shed its pejorative "junior" college label and is generally called a "community" college, a clearly value-laden expression representing the latest commitment in higher education. Even the doctoral degree, long recognized as a required "union card" in the academic world, has come under severe criticism as the pursuit of learning for its own sake and the accumulation of knowledge without immediate application to a professor"s classroom duties. The idea of a college or university that performs a triple function--communicating knowledge to students, expanding the content of various disciplines, and interacting in a direct relationship with society--has been the most important change in higher education in recent years. This novel development, however, is often overlooked. Educators have always been familiar with those parts of the two-year college curriculum that have a "service" or vocational orientation. It is important to know this. But some commentaries on American postsecondary education tend to underplay the impact of the attempt of colleges and universities to relate to, if not resolve, the problems of society. What"s worse, they obscure a fundamental question posed by the service-university--what is higher education supposed to do?

单选题Thomas Hardy's impulses as a writer, all of which indulged in his novels, were numerous and divergent, and they did not always work together in harmony. Hardy was to some degree interested in exploring his characters' psychologies, though impelled less by curiosity than by sympathy. Occasionally he felt the impulse to comedy (in all its detached coldness) as well as the impulse to farce, but he was more often inclined to see tragedy and record it. He was also inclined to literary realism in the several senses of that phrase; He wanted to describe ordinary human beings. He wanted to speculate on their dilemmas rationally (and, unfortunately even schematically); and he wanted to record precisely the material universe. Finally, he wanted to be more than a realist. He wanted to transcend what he considered to be the banality of solely recording things exactly and to express as well his awareness of the occult and the strange. In his novels these various impulses were sacrificed to each other inevitably and often inevitably, because Hardy did not care in the way that novelists such as Flaubert or James learned, and therefore took paths of least resistance. Thus one impulse often surrendered to a fresher one and, unfortunately, instead of exacting a compromise, simply disappeared. A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give way abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and texture of a flower. In this instance, the new impulse was at least an energetic one. And thus its indulgence did not result in a relaxed style. But on other occasions Hardy abandoned a perilous risky and highly energizing impulse in favor of what was for him the fatally relaxing impulse to classify and schematize abstractly. When a relaxing impulse was indulged, the style--that sure index of an author's literary worth--was certain to become verbose. Hardy's weakness derived from his apparent inability to control the comings and goings of these divergent impulses and from his unwillingness to cultivate and sustain the energetic and risky ones. He submitted of first one and then another, and the spirit blew where it listed; hence the unevenness of any one of his novels. His most controlled novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, prominently exhibits two different but reconcilable impulses--a desire to be a realist-historian and a desire to be a psychologist of love but the slight interlockings of plot are not enough to bind the two completely together. Thus even this book splits into two distinct parts.

单选题What scenario does the author wish for young people when arrive back from their travels?

单选题With 22 years on the job, Jackie Bracey could be considered a career employee of the Internal Revenue Service. But she defies any stereotype of an over-eager agent running down a reluctant taxpayer. Instead, she spends her time defending people who owe the government money. Ms. Bracey, based in Greensboro N. C., is a taxpayer advocate, a created by Congress in 1998 as part of the kinder, gentler theme adopted by the tax collection agency. Bracey and advocates at 73 Other offices nationwide, backed by 2,100 field workers and staff, go to bat for taxpayers who are in financial straits because of something the agency has done or is about to do. Though it may seem contrary to the IRS, the advocate service not only helps taxpayers, but identifies procedural problems. The main goal, though, is for the ombudsman to step into a dispute a taxpayer is having with the IRS when it appears that something the IRS is doing, or planning, would create an undue hardship on the taxpayer. This can range from speeding up resolution of a dispute that has dragged on too long, to demanding that the IRS halt a collection action that the taxpayer can show he or she “is suffering or is about to suffer a significant hardship.” Taxpayer ombudsmen have been around in one form or another since 1979, says Nina Olson, the national taxpayer advocate. But they were given much more power in 1998 when Congress decided that the workers would no longer report to regional directors but to her office. While this gave them a great deal more authority, outside watchdogs say more can be done. “There is a long way to go to get an agency that feels independent and emboldened to work for taxpayers”, says Joe Seep, a vice president of the Washington-based tax-advocacy group. The taxpayers union also has complained that Congress and the Bush administration don’t seem to be taking the advocates seriously enough. Each year, the IRS group reports to Congress on the top problems that advocates see. Many of these are systemic problems that can gum up the works for both taxpayer and collector, such as a December notice from Ms. Olson that the IRS should have just one definition of a dependent child, rather than the three definitions currently used. While taxpayer advocates can help smooth things out in many cases, they cannot ignore laws. If taxpayers haven’t made legitimate claims for credits, there’s nothing the advocate can do to reverse that course. And Olson says that while taxpayers are free to use her service, they should keep in mind that it does not replace the normal appeals process and should be the last place a citizen calls upon for help, not the first. “We’re really there for .when the processes fall down,” she says. Every state has at least one taxpayer-advocate service office.

单选题With U.S. companies sitting on an estimated $1.8 trillion in cash, it raises the question: Why aren't they deploying more of their hoard to expand their businesses? Or one might channel John Maynard Keynes to ask: Where have the "animal spirits" gone? Although capital spending in the U.S. is up 12 percent since the lows of early 2009, it's still running $88 billion below the peak of $1.34 trillion reached in the first quarter of 2008, says Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. He doesn't expect capital spending to catch up to that peak level and officially start to expand until the second quarter of 2011. (LaVorgna's definition of capital spending includes physical equipment and software, but not structures such as new stores or manufacturing plants. Spending on structures is about 2 percent of gross domestic product, one-third the size of capital sending's contribution to GDP, he says.) "The trend and momentum have definitely turned and it's just a matter of time before you see other companies give way to capital spending, and eventually that will result in hiring," says LaVorgna. But with spending running $88 billion below peak, he says employment "should be farther along than it is." Companies that have built up a lot of cash are starting to take some chances such as expanding into new markets, which requires hiring new workers, says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consulting firm. U.S. companies have announced the hiring of 118,209 new employees through August, according to data collected by the firm. So who's stepping up to the plate? Some companies refuse to be cowed and are taking big, if calculated, chances, including ambitious capital projects, hiring new workers, and expanded investment in research and development, according to growth-oriented mutual fund managers contacted by Businessweek.com. If there's a common denominator, it's a perceived opportunity and confidence in sustainable demand, whether due to new trends in technology or to new markets that need certain products. Other names came from a list of the top-hiring U.S. companies through July 2010 compiled by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "We don't spend capital unless we have a new contract to supply oxygen, nitrogen, or hydrogen to our customers," says James Sawyer, Praxair's chief financial officer. "Those are 15-year contracts with minimal take-or-pay clauses written into them, which ensure we will get a good return on our capital investment, regardless of how the rest of the economy is doing." Some younger outfits with entrepreneurial managers who have lived through a few business cycles think their companies may be able to steal a march on competitors more reluctant to spend, says Aram Green, manager of Clear Bridge Advisors Small Cap Growth Fund. "There's clearly been a decision by management that 'This is not the time to take our foot off the accelerator. In fact, it's time to push harder and further distance our product from the competition.'/

单选题What is implied in the first sentence?