单选题What is the author's attitude toward the reconstruction of The Pentagon and the World Trade Center?

单选题What's the public's opinion about nuclear industry?

单选题The rooftop garden project

单选题In the 1960s, Peru's sugar industry was among the most efficient in the world. It was all downhill thereafter. A military government expropriated the sugar estates on the country' s north coast, turning them into government-owned co-operatives. Having peaked at 1m tonnes in 1975, output fell to 400,000 tonnes by the early 1990s. But since then the sugar industry has passed into private hands again. Over the past decade production has returned to its historic peak—and is now set to boom. The change has been gradual. The government has sold its stake in the industry in tranches. But now investors are piling in. As in other parts of South and Central America they are attracted by higher prices for sugar because of its use for ethanol. Industry sources predict that land under sugar will expand by 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) a year, more than doubling output over the next decade. That would turn Peru into an exporter—though not on the scale of Brazil or Colombia. Last year, local investors secured a controlling stake in Casa Grande, the largest sugar plantation. Bioterra, a Spanish company, plans a $ 90m ethanol plant nearby. Maple, a Texas company, has bought 10,600 hectares of land in the northern department of Piura. Its plans call for an investment of $120m and ethanol production of 120m litres a year. Brazilian and Ecuadorean investors are also active. Part of the attraction is that Peru has signed a free-trade agreement with the United States. Provided that it can satisfy the concerns of the new Democratic-controlled Congress in Washington D. C., about the enforcement of labour rights, this agreement should be approved later this year. It would render permanent existing trade preferences under which ethanol from Peru can enter the United States dutyfree. By contrast, ethanol exported from Brazil, the world's biggest producer, must pay a tariff of 54 cents a gallon. Two harsh realities might sour these sweet dreams. Colombia, Central America and the Dominican Republic all enjoy similar preferences and have similar plans. Colombia already produces 360m litres a year of ethanol, much of it for export. The second question is whether sugar—a thirsty crop—is the best use of Peru's desert coastal strip, with its precarious water supply. One of the country's achievements of the past decade has been the private sector's development of new export crops. It would be ironic if these businesses were threatened by sugar's privatisation.

单选题Schools have banned cupcakes, issued obesity report cards and cleared space in cafeterias for salad bars. Just last month, Michelle Obama"s campaign to end childhood obesity promised to get young people moving more and improve school lunch, and beverage makers said they had cut the sheer number of liquid calories shipped to schools by almost 90 percent in the past five years. But new research suggests that interventions aimed at school-aged children may be, if not too little, too late. More and more evidence points to crucial events very early in life—-during the toddler years, infancy and even before birth—that can set young children on an obesity track that is hard to alter by the time they"re in kindergarten. The evidence is not invulnerable, but it suggests that prevention efforts should start very early. Among the findings are these: The chubby angelic baby who is growing so nicely may be growing too much for his or her own good, research suggests. Babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are at risk of becoming obese, even though the babies are usually small at birth. Babies who sleep less than 12 hours are at increased risk for obesity later. If they don"t sleep enough and also watch two hours or more of TV a day, they are at even greater risk. Some early interventions are already widely practiced. Doctors recommend that overweight women lose weight before pregnancy rather than after, to cut the risk of obesity and diabetes in their children; breast-feeding is also recommended to lower the obesity risk. But weight or diet restrictions on young children have been avoided. "It used to be kind of taboo to label a child under 5 as overweight or obese, even if the child was—the thinking was that it was too disgraceful," said Dr. Elsie M. Taveras of Harvard Medical School, lead author of a recent paper on racial difference in early risk factors. Scientists worry about what are called epigenetic changes. The genes inherited from mother and father may be turned on and off and the strength of their effects changed by environmental conditions in early development. Many doctors are concerned about women being obese and unhealthy before pregnancy because, as they point out, the womb is the baby"s first environment. Experts say change may require abandoning some cherished cultural attitudes. "The idea that a big baby is a healthy baby, and a crying baby is probably a hungry baby who should be fed, are things we really need to rethink," Dr. Birch said.

单选题 Under pressure from animal welfare groups, two national science teachers associations have adopted guidelines that ban classroom experiments harming animals. The National Association of Biology Teachers and the National Science Teachers Association hope to end animal abuse in elementary and secondary schools and, in turn, discourage students from mishandling animals in home experiments and science fair projects. Animal welfare groups are apparently most concerned with high school students experimenting with animals in extracurricular projects. Barbara Orlans, President of the Scientists' Center for Animal Welfare, said that students have been performing surgery at random, testing known poisonous substances, and running other pathology experiments on animals without even knowing normal physiology. At one science fair, a student cut off the leg and tail of a lizard to demonstrate that only the tail can regenerate, she said. In another case, a student bound sparrows, starved them and observed their behavior. "The amount of abuse has been quite horrifying," Orlans said. Administrators of major science fairs are short-tempered over the teachers' policy change and the impression it has created. "The teachers were sold a bill of goods by Barbara Ortans," said Thurman Grafton, who heads the rules committee for the International Science and Engineering Fair. "Backyard tabletop surgery is just nonsense. The new policies throw cold water on students' inquisitiveness," he said. Grafton said he wouldn't deny that there hasn't been animal abuse among projects at the international fair, but he added that judges reject contestants who have unnecessarily injured animals. The judges have a hard time monitoring local and regional fairs that may or may not choose to comply with the international fair's rules that stress proper care of animals, Grafton said. He said that several years ago, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search banned harmful experiments to animals when sponsors threatened to cancel their support after animal welfare groups lobbied for change. The teachers adopted the new policies also to fend off proposed legislation--in states including Missouri and New York--that would restrict or prohibit experiments on animals. Officials of the two teachers organizations say that they don't know how many animals have been abused in the classroom. On the one hand, many biology teachers are not trained in the proper care of animals, said Wayne Moyer, executive director of the biology teachers' association. On the other, the use of animals in experiments has dropped in recent years because of school budget cuts. The association may set up seminars to teach better animal care to its members. (414 words){{B}}Notes:{{/B}} pathology 病理学。lizard 蜥蜴。tabletop 桌面。short-tempered 脾气急躁的。lobby for 游说支持。fend off 躲开。

单选题The collapse of Enron, the largest bankruptcy in American history, has rung out a banner year for American business failures. In Europe, the fallout from the Swissair and Sabena insolvencies continues. In the current global slump, more companies are likely to go under. Now is a perfect time to reconsider how to handle such failures: let them sink, or give them a chance to swim? In America, bankruptcy has come to mean a second chance for bust businesses. The famous "Chapter 11" law aims to give a company time to get back on its feet, by shielding it from debt payments and prodding banks to negotiate with their debtor. It even allows an insolvent company to receive fresh finance after it goes bust. On the other side of the Atlantic, when companies stumble, almost as much effort is spent in fingering the guilty as in trying to salvage a viable business. British and French laws, for example, can make a failing company"s directors face criminal penalties and personal liability. Moreover, bankers have the power, at the first sign of trouble, to push a company into the arms of the receivers. Some modest changes are afoot, however. Britain is considering moves that would bring its rules closer to America"s. New laws in Germany should also make it easier to revive sick companies, although trade unions still have their say. But even with the arrival of the euro and moves towards a single financial market, going bust in Europe is a strictly local affair. Long before America had a single currency, the American constitution provided uniform bankruptcy laws, observes Elizabeth Warren of the Harvard Law School. Europe"s patchwork of national laws, according to Bill Brandt of " Development Specialists", a consultancy, inhibits lending and makes it difficult to fix ailing firms. Transatlantic insolvencies are even harder, as a Belgian-based software company, Lernout and Hauspie, discovered this year. Its American reorganization plan was thwarted by a Belgian judge, who ordered a sale of the firm"s assets. As the European Union inches toward greater harmonization, should it try to mimic America? Critics of Chapter 11 think not. They argue that America"s bankruptcy system is wasteful, lets failed managers go unpunished, and gives some companies an unfair advantage. In Chapter 11, admittedly, lawyers and advisers gobble up fees, but a recent study argues that the fees are no larger than those for most mergers and acquisitions. One common complaint, that managers enjoy the high life while creditors go begging, fails to stand up to the data from America"s previous wave of bankruptcies in the early 1990s. Stuart Gilson of the Harvard Business School found that more than two-thirds of top managers were ousted within two years of a bankruptcy filing. More troubling is that some American firms seem to enjoy second and third trips to bankruptcy court, cheekily termed Chapters 22 and 33. Some see this as evidence that, ton often, they use Chapter 11 to keep running. But there is more to the story.

单选题According to the text, the most important advances made by mankind most probably stem from

单选题The author's attitude toward Mr Ribeiro' s view seems to be

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} It's easy to get the sense these days that you've stumbled into a party with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren't. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They've changed into something like their own opposite. There's Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy(慈善事业) with him. There's historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. To {{U}}flip-flop{{/U}}is human. It can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological(病态的). He's a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush:" He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday -- no matter what happened on Tuesday." Over the past three years, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I've got it all wrong. It looked at first like a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that we're all connected. Everything leans on something, is both dependent and depended on. "The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago," is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it's a line." The remark prompted the professor to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences between the Western and the Asian mind. To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.

单选题 The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square kilometers of ice in a relentless summer of melt, with scientists watching through satellite eyes for a possible record low polar ice cap. From the barren Arctic shore of a village in Canada's far northwest, veteran observer Eddie Gruben has seen the summer ice {{U}}retreating{{/U}} more each decade as the world has warmed. By this weekend the ice edge lay 128 kilometers at sea, but forty years ago, it was 64 kilometers out. Global average temperatures rose 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, but Arctic temperatures rose twice as much or even faster, almost certainly in good part because of manmade greenhouse gases, researchers say. In late July the mercury soared to almost 86 degrees Fahrenheit in this settlement of 900 Arctic Eskimos. As of Thursday, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported, the polar ice cap extended over 6.75 million square kilometers after having shrunk an average 106,000 square kilometers a day in July-equivalent to one Indiana or three Belgiums daily. The rate of melt was similar to that of July 2007, the year when the ice cap dwindled to a record low minimum extent of 4.3 million square kilometers in September. In its latest analysis, NSIDC said Arctic atmospheric conditions this summer have been similar to those of the summer of 2007, including a high-pressure ridge that produced clear skies and strong melt in the Beaufort Sea, the arm of the Arctic Ocean off northern Alaska and northwestern Canada. Scientists say the makeup of the frozen polar sea has shifted significantly the past few years, as thick multiyear ice has given way as the Arctic's dominant form to thin ice that comes and goes with each winter and summer. The past few years have "signaled a fundamental change in the character of the ice and the Arctic climate, " Meier said. Ironically, the summer melts since 2007 appear to have allowed disintegrating but still thick multiyear ice to drift this year into the relatively narrow channels of the Northwest Passage. Usually impassable channels had been relatively ice-free the past two summers. Observation satellites' remote sensors will tell researchers in September whether the polar cap diminished this summer to its smallest size on record. Then the sun will begin to slip below the horizon for several months, and temperatures plunging in the polar darkness will freeze the surface of the sea again, leaving this and other Arctic coastlines in the grip of ice. Most of the sea ice will be new, thinner and weaker annual formations, however. At a global conference last March in Copenhagen, scientists declared that climate change is occurring faster than had been anticipated, citing the fast-dying Arctic cap as one example. A month later, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted Arctic summers could be almost ice-free within 30 years, not at the century's end as earlier predicted.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Stinking buses, their passengers pale and tired, jam the crowded streets. Drivers shout at one another and honk their horns. Smog smarts the eyes and chokes the senses. The scene is Athens at rush hour. The city of Plato and Pericles is in a sorry state of affairs, built without a plan, lacking even adequate sewerage facilities, hemmed in by mountains and the sea, its 135 square miles crammed with 3.7 million pepole. Even Athens' ruins are in ruin: sulfur dioxiode eats away at the marble of the Parthenon and other treasures on the Acropolis. As Greek Premier Constantine Karamanlis has said, "The only solution for Athens would be to demolish half of it and start all over again." So great has been the population flow toward the city that entire hinterland villages stand vacant or nearly so. About 120000 people from outlying provinces move to Athens every year, with the result that 40% of Greece's citizenry are now packed into the capital. The migrants come for the few available jobs, which are usually no better than the ones they fled. At the current rate of migration, Athens by the year 2000 will have a population of 6.5 million, more than half the nation. Aside from overcrowding and poor public transport, the biggest problems confronting Athenians are noise and pollution. A government study concluded that Athens was the noisiest city in the world. Smog is almost at killing levels: 180 300 mg of sulfur dioxide per cubic meter of air, or up to four times the level that the World Health Organization considers safe. Nearly half the pollution comes from cars. Despite high prices for vehicles and fuel (＄2.95 per gallon) ,nearly 100000 automobiles are sold in Greece each year;3000 driver's licenses are issued in Athens monthly. After decades of neglect, Athens is at last getting some attention. In March a committee of representatives from all major public service ministries met to discuss a plan to unclog the city, make it livable and clean up its environment. A save-Athens ministry, which will soon begin functioning, will propose heavy taxes to discourage in-migration, a minimum of ＄5 billion in public spending for Athens alone, and other projects for the countryside to encourage residents to stay out. A master plan that will move many goverment offices to the city's fringes is already in the works. Meanwhile, more Greeks keep moving into Athens. With few parks and precious few oxygen-producing plants, the city and its citizens are literally suffocating.

单选题Multifunction superpills aren't nearly as farfetched as they may sound. And reducing such serious risks to heart health as soaring cholesterol, diabetes, and high blood pressure potentially could save many lives and be highly lucrative for drug companies. A combo pill from Pfizer (PFE) of its hypertension drug Norvasc and cholesterol-lowering agent Lipitor "could have huge potential," says Shaojing Tong, analyst at Mehta Partners. "Offering two functions in one pill itself is a huge convenience." If such pills catch on, they could generate significant revenues for drug companies. In Pfizer's ease, the goal is to transfer as many qualified patients as possible to the combo pill. Norvasc's patents expire in 2007, but Pfizer could avoid losing all its revenues from the drug at once if it were part of a superpill. Sena Lund, an analyst at Cathay Financial, sees Pfizer selling $4.2 billion worth of Norvasc-Lipitor by 2007. That would help take up the slack for falling sales of Lipitor, which he projects will drop to $5 billion in 2007, down from $ 8 billion last year. Pfizer argues that addressing two distinct and serious cardiovascular risk factors in one pill has advantages. People with both hypertension and high LDL cholesterol (the "bad" kind) number around 27 million in the U. S. , notes Craig Hopkinson, medical director for dual therapy at Pfizer, and only 2% of that population reaches adequate treatment goals. Taking two treatments in one will increase the number of patients who take the medications properly and "assist in getting patients to goal," be says. Doctors also may be quick to adopt Norvasc-Lipitor, Pfizer figures, because it's made up of two well-studied drugs, which many physicians are already familiar with. But Dr. Stanley Rockson, chief of consultative cardiology at Stanford University Medical Center, says fixed-dose combination pills represent "an interesting crossroads" for physicians, who are typically trained to "approach each individual problem with care." Combining treatments would challenge doctors to approach heart disease differently. But better patient compliance is important enough, says Rockson, that he expects doctors, to Be open to trying the combined pill. Some other physicians are more skeptical. "If you want to change dosage on one of the new pill's two drugs, you're stuck," fears Dr. Irene Gavris, professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. She says she would feel most comfortable trying the combination pill on patients who "have been on the drugs for a while" and are thus unlikely to need changes in dosage. As usual, economics could tip the scales. Patients now taking both Lipitor and Norvasc "could cut their insurance co pay in half" by switching to the combo drug, Gavris notes. That's a key advantage. Controlling hypertension, for instance, can require three or more drugs, and the financial burden on patients mounts quickly. If patients also benefit--as Pfizer and other drug companies contend--making the switch to superpills could be advantageous for everyone.