单选题Which of the following is the most appropriate title for the passage, based on its content?

单选题Treating waste water is energy intensive. In the US, it sucks up the equivalent output of four of the country's biggest power plants every year. But it needn't be such a drain on resources—soon it might be able to earn its keep. A team led by Hong Liu from Oregon State University in Corvallis has plans for microbial fuel cells that will reclaim energy from waste water and produce around 2.87 watts per litre of waste water. That is almost double the amount of electrical power usual for such a cell. And its by-products could be harnessed to create cheap, biodegradable plastics. Waste water holds huge amounts of energy, bound up in organic molecules, but it can be difficult to access. The Oregon fuel ceils run on microbes that would normally digest organic matter to produce water. In a fuel cell, though, isolated from oxygen, that conversion stops and electrons, which are bundled with protons and oxygen to form water, are pulled away from the microbes by the potential between a cathode and an anode, creating an electrical current. As well as transferring the mixture of microbes on the electrodes, the Oregon design has also managed to squash far more electrodes into the fuel cell than on previous versions. Liu says her lab aims to scale up the device within the next five years and make it cheaper. The by-products of waste water treatment can be harnessed too. Engineers are working on a way to convert methane into biodegradable plastics. The dream plastic would be biodegradable, made from organic materials, and break down easily. At the moment, polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) seems like the best bet. But PHA plastics are manufactured by genetically modified bacteria fed on sugars in a process that is both expensive and complex, making it hard for them to compete with conventional plastics. In the past, researchers have used the by-products of waste water treatment to generate fuel and sometimes even to create plastics, but nearly all these attempts have focused on the solid waste and chemicals. Because the solid waste is made of many diverse components, it produces a less stable plastic. So Molly Morse of Mango Materials in California and colleagues are now using methane, another major by-product of treating waste water. Methanotrophs, simple organisms that feed on methane, are much better at converting it into polymers than typical bacteria are at converting sugar into plastics. Methane is pumped into a vat of methanotrophs—harvested from the waste water treatment plant itself—along with a bubbling stream of oxygen and a few other nutrients. The end result is a polymer powder that can be separated from the mass of bacteria and turned into pellets for shaping into commercial plastic products.

单选题[e] still

单选题If you leave a loaded weapon lying around, it is bound to go off sooner or later. Snow- covered northern Europe heard the gunshot loud and clear when Russia cut supplies to Ukraine this week as part of a row about money and power, the two eternal battlegrounds of global energy. From central Europe right across to France on the Atlantic seaboard, gas supplies fell by more than one-third. For years Europeans had been telling themselves that a cold-war enemy which had supplied them without fail could still be depended on now it was an ally (of sorts). Suddenly, nobody was quite so sure. Fearing the threat to its reputation as a supplier, Russia rapidly restored the gas and settled its differences with Ukraine. But it was an uncomfortable glimpse of the dangers for a continent that imports roughly half its gas and that Gerard Mestrallet, boss of Suez, a French water and power company, expects to be importing 80% of its gas by 2030 much of it from Russia. It was scarcely more welcome for America, which condemned Russia's tactics. And no wonder: it consumes one-quarter of the world's oil, but produces only 3% of the stuff. Over the coming years, the world's dependence on oil looks likely to concentrate on the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. Russian oil had seemed a useful alternative. Fear of the energy weapon has a long history. When producers had the upper hand in the oil embargo of 1973-74, Arab members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cut supply, sowing turmoil and a global recession. When consumers had the upper hand in the early 1990s, the embargo cut the other way. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the world shut in 5m barrels a day (b/d) of production from the two countries in an attempt to force him out. With oil costing ＄60 a barrel, five times more than the nominal price in 1999, and spot prices for natural gas in some European and American markets at or near record levels, power has swung back to the producers for the first time since the early 1980s. Nobody knows how long today's tight markets will last. "It took us a long time to get there and it will take us a long time to get back," says Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy in Washington. A clutch of alarmist books with titles such as "The Death of Oil" predict that so little oil is left in the ground that producers will always have pricing power. The question is how worried consumers should be. What are the threats to energy security and what should the world do about them? The answers suggest a need for planning and a certain amount of grim realism, but not for outright panic.

单选题According to Larson, to redress the traffic problem______

单选题According to the text, Nimbys seems to reject

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} William Shakespeare described old age as "second childishness" — sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste. In the case of taste he may, musically speaking, have been even more perceptive than he realized. A paper in Neurology by Giovanni Frisoni and his colleagues at the National Centre for Research and Care of Alzheimer's Disease in Brescia, Italy, shows that one form of senile dementia can affect musical desires in ways that suggest a regression, if not to infancy, then at least to a patient's teens. Frontotemporal dementia is caused, as its name suggests, by damage to the front and sides of the brain. These regions are concerned with speech, and with such "higher" functions as abstract thinking and judgment. Frontotemporal damage therefore produces different symptoms from the loss of memory associated with Alzheimer's disease, a more familiar dementia that affects the hippocampus and amygdala in the middle of the brain. Frontotemporal dementia is also rarer than Alzheimer's. In the past five years the centre in Brescia has treated some 1,500 Alzheimer's patients; it has seen only 46 with frontotemporal dementia. Two of those patients interested Dr. Frisoni. One was a 68-year-old lawyer, the other a 73-year-old housewife. Both had undamaged memories, but displayed the sorts of defect associated with frontotemporal dementia—a diagnosis that was confirmed by brain scanning. About two years after he was first diagnosed, the lawyer, once a classical music lover who referred to pop music as "mere noise", started listening to the Italian pop band "883". As his command of language and his emotional attachments to friends and family deteriorated, he continued to listen to the band at full volume for many hours a day. The housewife had not even had the lawyer's love of classical music, having never enjoyed music of any sort in the past. But about a year after her diagnosis she became very interested in the songs that her 11-year-old granddaughter was listening to. This kind of change in musical taste was not seen in any of the Alzheimer's patients, and thus appears to be specific to those with frontotemporal dementia. And other studies have remarked on how frontotemporal dememia patients sometimes gain new talents. Five sufferers who developed artistic abilities are known. And in another lapse of musical taste, one woman with the disease suddenly started composing and singing country and western songs. Dr. Frisoni speculates that the illness is causing people to develop a new attitude towards novel experiences. Previous studies of novelty-seeking behavior suggest that it is managed by the brain's right frontal lobe. A predominance of the right over the left frontal lobe, caused by damage to the latter, might thus lead to a quest for new experience. Alternatively, the damage may have affected some specific neural circuit that is needed to appreciate certain kinds of music. Whether that is a gain or a loss is a different matter. As Dr. Frisoni puts it in his article, De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est. Or, in plainer words, there is no accounting for taste.

单选题The word "thwarted" in Paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to

单选题The text suggests that the failure of a large business to have its bids for subcontracts result quickly in orders might cause it to

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} We have to realize how old, how very old, we are. Nations are classified as "aged" when they have 7 percent or more of their people aged 65 or above, and by about 1970 every one of the advanced countries had become like this. Of the really ancient societies, with over 13 percent above 65, all are in Northwestern Europe. We know that we are getting even older, and that the nearer a society approximates to zero population growth, the older its population is likely to be--at least, for any future that concerns us now. To these now familiar facts a number of further facts may be added, some of them only recently recognized. There is the apparent paradox that the effective cause of the high proportion of the old is births rather than death. There is the economic principle that the dependency ratio--the degree to which those who cannot earn depend for a living on those who can--is more advantageous in older societies like ours than in the younger societies of the developing world, because lots of dependent babies are more of a liability than numbers of the inactive aged. There is the appreciation of the historical truth that the aging of advanced societies has been a sudden change. If "revolution" is a rapid resettlement of the social structure, and if the age composition of the society counts as a very important aspect of that social structure, then there has been a social revolution in European and particularly Western European society within the lifetime of everyone over 50. Taken together, these things have implications which are only beginning to be acknowledged. These facts and circumstances had a leading position at a world gather about aging as a challenge to science and to policy, held at Vichy in France. There is often resistance to the idea that it is because the birth rate fell earlier in Western and Northwestern Europe than elsewhere, rather than because of any change in the death rate, that we have grown so old. But this is what elementary demography makes clear. Long life is altering our society, of course, but in experiential terms. We have among us a very much greater experience of continued living than any society that has preceded us anywhere, and this will continue. But too much of that lengthening experience, even in the wealthy West, will be experience of poverty and neglect, unless we do something about it. If you are in your thirties, you ought to be aware that you can expect to live nearly one third of the rest of your life after the age of 60. The older you are now, the greater this proportion will be, and greater still if you are a woman.

单选题The last paragraph mainly discusses______

单选题Some oil companies plan to get rid of some of the pollution they produce by pumping it into rocks deep inside the Earth, where they say it will stay for thousands of years. Other people, though, aren' t so sure this is advisable; environmental groups say that putting this pollution back into the Earth is a had idea. When oil burns, It doesn' t just produce heat: it also produces carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a natural part of the air, but because people bum so much oil, there' s too much carbon dioxide in the air. This extra carbon dioxide is pollution; some scientific studies show that carbon dioxide is one of the" greenhouse gases" that is causing the Earth's temperature to rise. Environmentalists say that the oil companies' plans may not work. The oil companies say they are making sure that the gas will never escape, but environmentalists wonder how the oil companies can be so sure that the gas won' t seep into the air. They also point out that there' s no way to check to make sure the gas isn't leaking. In addition, the environmentalists point out that the pumping costs money—for research and for equipment--that the oil companies should be spending on preventing pollution, rather than on just moving it someplace else. Another problem ,say some people who are concerned about the Earth, is that if the oil companies find a cheap way to get rid of their pollution, they won' t look for new kinds of energy. These environmentalists say that energy companies should be researching ways to use hydrogen, wind power, and solar power instead of finding better ways to use oil. They argue that continuing to use oil means that we will still need to buy oil from other countries instead of producing our own cheap, clean energy. Environmentalists also say that burying pollution just pushes the problem into the future, rather than really solving it. They say that if the oil companies pump carbon dioxide into the rocks inside the Earth, it will be there for thousands of years, and that no one knows if this plan—even if it works--might turn into a pollution problem for all of us in the future. The oil companies insist that their plan is safe, and that putting the gas inside the Earth is a reasonable way to deal with it, They point out that there is a lot of room in the Earth for this extra gas, and that putting carbon dioxide inside the Earth means that the gas won' t be in the air, and if it' s not in the air, it won' t make the Earth warmer.

单选题In some ways, the United States has made spectacular progress. Fires no longer destroy 18,000 buildings as they did in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, or kill half a town of 2,400 people, as they did the same night in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Other than the Beverly Hill Supper Club fire in Kentucky in 1977, it has been four decades since more than 100 Americans died in a fire. But even with such successes, the United States still has one of the worst fire death rates in the world. Safety experts say the problem is neither money nor technology, but the indifference of a country that just will not take fires seriously enough. American fire departments are some of the world's fastest and best-equipped. They have to be. The United States has twice Japan's population, and 40 times as many fires. It spends far less on preventing fires than on fighting them. And American fire-safety lessons are aimed almost entirely at children, who die in disproportionately large numbers in fires but who, contrary to popular myth, start very few of them. Experts say the fatal error is an attitude that fires are not really anyone's fault. That is not so in other countries, where both public education and the law treat fires as either a personal failing or a crime. Japan has many wood houses; of the estimated 48 fires in world history, that burned more than 10,000 buildings, Japan has had 27. Penalties for causing a severe fire by negligence can be as high as life imprisonment. In the United States, most education dollars are spent in elementary schools. But the lessons are aimed at a too limited audience; just 9 percent of all fire deaths are caused by children playing with matches. The United States continues to rely more on technology than laws or social pressure. There are smoke detectors in 85 percent of all homes. Some local building codes now require home sprinklers. New heaters and irons shut themselves off if they are tipped.

单选题If put in new surroundings, Stanley may

单选题What kind of social form immediately followed the Roman Republic Age?