单选题One positive consequence of our current national crisis may be at least a temporary dent in Hollywood"s culture of violence. Fearful of offending audiences in the wake of the terrorist attack, some movie-makers have postponed the release of films with terrorist themes. Television writers are shelving or delaying scripts with warlike and terrorist scenarios. It is probably good thinking. My local video store tells me nobody is checking out "disaster" movies. Says the manager, "Currently, people want comedy. They want an escape from stories about violence and terrorism." Similarly, in the music business, there"s a run on patriotic and inspirational tapes and CDs. According to the New York Times , the self-scrutiny among these czars of mass-entertainment taste is unprecedented in scale, sweeping aside hundreds of millions of dollars in projects that no longer seem appropriate. A reasonable concern is that this might be a short-term phenomenon. Once life returns to something more normal, will Hollywood return to its bad old ways? The Times offers a glimmer of hope. The industry"s titans, it suggests, are grappling with much more difficult, long-range questions of what the public will want once the initial shock from the terrorist attacks wears off. Many in the industry admit they do not know where the boundaries of taste and consumer tolerance now lie. This is an opportunity for some of us to suggest to Hollywood where that boundary of consumer tolerance is. Especially those of us who have not yet convinced Hollywood to cease its descent into ever-lower of desensitization of our young. The nonprofit, nonpartisan Parents Television Council, which monitors the quality of TV programming, says in its latest report that today"s TV shows are more laced than ever with vulgarities, sexual immorality, crudities, violence, and foul language. The traditional family hour between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., when the networks used to offer programs for the entire family, has disappeared. The problem looks like it will get worse. That certainly looked to be the case before the Sep. 11 assault. One pre-attack the New York Times story reported that TV producers were crusading for scripts that include every crude word imaginable. The struggles between network censors and producers, according to the report, were "growing more intense". Producers like Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing planned to keep pushing hard. He was quoted as saying, "There"s absolutely no reason why we can"t use the language of adulthood in programs that are about adults." My guess is that a lot of adults don"t use the language Mr. Sorkin wants to use, and don"t enjoy having their children hear it. At this moment of crisis in our nation"s history, thought has become more contemplative, prayerful, and spiritual. It may be the time to tell the entertainment industry that we want not a temporary pause in the flow of tastelessness, but a long-term cleanup.

单选题Nobody ever went into academia to make a fast buck. Professors, especially those in medical-and technology-related fields, typically earn a fraction of what their colleagues in industry do. But suddenly, big money is starting to flow into the ivory tower, as university administrators wake up to the commercial potential of academic research. And the institutions are wrestling with a whole new set of issues. The profits are impressive: the Association of University Technology Managers surveyed 132 universities and found that they earned a combined $ 576 million from patent royalties in 1998, a number that promises to keep rising dramatically. Schools like Columbia University in New York have aggressively marketed their inventions to corporations, particularly pharmaceutical and high-tech companies. Now Columbia is going retail on the Web. It plans to go beyond the typical "dot. edu" model, free sites listing courses and professors" research interests. Instead, it will offer the expertise of its faculty on a new for-profit site which will be spun off as an independent company. The site will provide free access to educational and research content, say administrators, as well as advanced features that are already available to Columbia students, such as a simulation of the construction and architecture of a French cathedral and interactive 3-D models of organic chemicals. Free pages will feel into profit-generating areas, such as online courses and seminars, and related books and tapes. Columbia executive vice provost Michael Crow imagines "millions of visitors" to the new site, including retirees and students willing to pay to tap into this educational resource. "We can offer the best of what"s thought and written and researched," says Ann Kirschner, who heads the project. Columbia also is anxious not be aced out by some of the other for-profit "knowledge sites," such as About. com and Hungry Minds. " If they capture this space," says Crow, "they"ll begin to cherry-pick our best faculty. " Profits from the sale of patents typically have been divided between the researcher, the department and the university, and Web profits would work the same way, so many faculty members are delighted. But others find the trend worrisome: is a professor who stands to profit from his or her research as credible as one who doesn"t? Will universities provide more support to researchers working in profitable fields than to scholars toiling in more musty areas? "If there"s the perception that we might be making money from our efforts, the authority of the university could be diminished," worries Herve Varenne, a cultural anthropology professor at Columbia"s education school. Says Kirschner: "We would never compromise the integrity of the university. "Whether the new site can add to the growing profits from patents remains to be seen, but one thing is clear. It"s going to take the best minds on campus to find a new balance between profit and purity.

单选题John Battelle is Silicon Valley's Bob Woodward. One of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider. Certainly, Google' s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, believe that it is safer to talk to Mr. Battelle than not to do so. The result is a highly readable account of Google's astonishing rise-the steepest in corporate history-from its origins in Stanford University to its controversial stockmarket debut and its current struggle to become a grown-up company while staying true to its youthfully brash motto, "Don't be evil." Mr. Battelle makes the reader warm to Google's ruling triumvirate-their cleverness and their good intentions-and fear for their future as they take on the world. Google is one of the most interesting companies around at the moment. It has a decent shot at displacing Microsoft as the next great near-monopoly of the information age. Its ambition-to organise all the world's information, not just the information on the world wide web-is epic, and its commercial power is frightening, Beyond this, Google is interesting for the same reason that secretive dictatorships and Hollywood celebrities are interesting-for being opaque, colourful and, simply, itself. The book disappoints only when Mr. Battelle begins trying to explain the wider relevance of internet search and its possible future development. There is a lot to say on this subject, but Mr. Battelle is hurried and overly chatty, producing laundry lists of geeky concepts without really having thought any of them through properly. This is not a fatal flaw. Read only the middle chapters, and you have a great book.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} A {{U}}mandatory{{/U}} traceability system in the United States would help improve the safety of food, such as produce, a health official told lawmakers on Wednesday, and three weeks after the government declared an end to the worst foodborne outbreak in a decade. In the past, some produce firms, including many in the tomato industry, use voluntary traceability programs but their approaches vary. Lawmakers said a mandatory program was overdue, and would help U.S. regulators improve safety and restore consumer confidence in food following a series of foodborne outbreaks since 2006. "It is the system that is broken," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture. "You still do not have mandatory traceability, mandatory performance standards. You are looking for a needle in a haystack." Regulators struggled to pinpoint the source of an outbreak of Salmonella St. Paul earlier this year that sickened more than 1,400 people and put 286 in the hospital. They initially focused on tomatoes before shifting their attention to peppers. The slow pace of the investigation, which later traced the Salmonella strain to jalapeno and serrano peppers from Mexico, has renewed calls for greater monitoring of fresh fruits and vegetables and a national system to track produce. The Bioterrorism Act of 2002 requires produce processors and distributors to keep track of where food goes and where it came from. This does not include restaurants and farms. "We are going clown a road of examining what is going to work," said David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's associate commissioner for food protection. He told the subcommittee a mandatory program "would have an impact." Acheson said FDA does not believe it has explicit authority to mandate a tracking system. The Salmonella outbreak was the latest health scare since 2006. The incidents, involving lettuce, peanut butter, pot pies and spinach, have resulted in dozens of hearings and proposals seeking tougher U.S. safety standards. The latest proposal, which DeLauro plans to introduce next week, would create a separate safety agency within the Department of Health and Human Services to handle all food safety issues currently administered by FDA In a briefing on food issues, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which includes leading companies such as General Mills Inc and ConAgra Foods Inc, expressed doubt that food safety legislation would be passed this year. Prospects dim further next year with a new administration pursuing its own agenda and congress dealing with other issues including health care and transportation. "This may be our only window for some period of time to actually enact these important reforms," said Scott Faber, a vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers. An estimated 76 million people in the United States get sick every year with foodborne illness and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

单选题The main aim of the WFP is to ______.

单选题Large, multinational corporations may be the companies whose ups and downs seize headlines. But to a far greater extent than most Americans realize, the economy's vitality depends on the fortunes of tiny shops and restaurants, neighborhood services and factories. Small businesses, defined as those with fewer than 100 workers, now employ nearly 60 percent of the work force and are expected to generate half of all new jobs between now and the year 2000. Some 1.2 million small firms have opened their doors over the past six years of economic growth, and 1989 will see an additional 200,000 entrepreneurs striking off on their own. Too many of these pioneers, however, will blaze ahead unprepared. Idealists will overestimate the clamor for their products or fail to factor in the competition. Nearly everyone will underestimate, often fatally, the capital that success requires. Midcareer executives, forced by a takeover or a restructuring to quit the corporation and find another way to support themselves, may savor the idea of being their own boss but may forget that entrepreneurs must also, at least for a while, be bookkeeper and receptionist, too. According to Small Business Administration data,24 of every 100 businesses starting out today are likely to have disappeared in two years, and 27 more will have shut their doors four years from now. By 1995,more than 60 of those 100 start-ups will have folded. A new study of 3,000 small businesses, sponsored by American Express and the National Federation of Independent Business, suggests slightly better odds: Three years after start-up, 77 percent of the companies surveyed were still alive. Most credited their success in large part to having picked a business they already were comfortable in. Eighty percent had worked with the same product or service in their last jobs. Thinking through an enterprise before the launch is obviously critical. But many entrepreneurs forget that a firm's health in its infancy may be little indication of how well it will age. You must tenderly monitor its pulse. In their zeal to expand, small-business owners often ignore early warning signs of a stagnant market or of decaying profitability. They hopefully pour more and more money into the enterprise, preferring not to acknowledge eroding profit margins that mean the market for their ingenious service or product has evaporated, or that they must cut the payroll or vacate their lavish offices. Only when the financial well runs dry do they see the seriousness of the illness, and by then the patient is usually too far gone to save. Frequent checks of your firm's vital signs will also guide you to a sensible rate of growth. To snatch opportunity, you must spot the signals that it is time to conquer new markets, add products or perhaps franchise your hot idea.

单选题When a country is under-populated, newcomers are not competitors, but assistants. If more come they may produce not only new quotas, but a (1) as well. In such a state of things land is (2) and cheap. The possession of it (3) no power or privilege. No one will work for another for wages (4) he can take up new land and be his own master. Hence it will pay no one to own more land than he can (5) by his own labor, or with such aid as his own family (6) . Hence, again, land (7) little or no rent; there will be no landlords living on rent and no laborers living on (8) , but only a middle class of yeoman farmers(自耕农). All are (9) on an equality, and democracy becomes the political form, because this is the only state of society in which equality, on which democracy is (10) , is realized as a fact. The same effects are powerfully (11) by other facts. In a new and under-populated country the industries which are most profitable are the extractive industries. The (12) of these, with the exception of some kinds of mining, is that they call (13) only a low organization of labor and small amount of capital. Hence they allow the workman to become (14) his own master, and they educate him to freedom, independence, and self (15) . At the same time, the social groups being only (16) marked off from each other, it is easy to (17) from one class of occupations, and consequently from one social grade, to another. Finally, under the same circumstances, education, skill, and superior training have but inferior value compared with what they have in (18) populated countries. The (19) lie in an under-populated country, with the (20) , unskilled, manual occupations, and not with the highest developments of science, literature, and art.

单选题It used to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working together in the laboratory would submit the results of their research to a journal. A journal editor would then remove the authors" names and affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review. Depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal. No longer. The Internet—and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it—is making access to scientific results a reality. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has just issued a report describing the far-reaching consequences of this. The report, by John Houghton of Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits. But it goes further than that. It signals a change in what has, until now, been a key element of scientific endeavor. The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. It is big business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion. The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers says that there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwide specializing in these subjects. They publish more than 1.2 million articles each year in some 16,000 journals. This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of scholarly journals are now online. Entirely new business models are emerging; three main ones were identified by the report"s authors. There is the so-called big deal, where institutional subscribers pay for access to a collection of online journal titles through site-licensing agreements. There is open-access publishing, typically supported by asking the author (or his employer) to pay for the paper to be published. Finally, there are open-access archives, where organizations such as universities or international laboratories support institutional repositories. Other models exist that are hybrids of these three, such as delayed open-access, where journals allow only subscribers to read a paper for the first six months, before making it freely available to everyone who wishes to see it. All this could change the traditional form of the peer-review process, at least for the publication of papers.

单选题A curious phenomenon occurs during every economic crisis—the rich whine that they are the ones who are suffering most. In current context, the wealthy even demands more tax cuts and more cuts in spending for programs aiding the poor, as every Republican presidential candidate promises. I first noticed this woe-is-me attitude among the rich in 1974 when Alan Greenspan had just been named chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. One of his first tasks was to address a conference with emphasis on cutting programs to aid the poor, which brought demonstrators to the event. In an effort to show that everyone was suffering from inflation, Mr. Greenspan said, "If you really wanted to examine percentage-wise who was hurt the most on their income, it was Wall Street brokers. " The urge to find ways to pity the well-off is still alive and well. Last week, Bloomberg News reported that declining bonuses are creating severe hardship for many in the top 1 percent of income distribution. One of them, Andrew Schiff, complained that his $ 350, 000 salary barely covers his expenses. Others lamented that they could no longer go to Aspen to ski and must buy discount salmon. I have to admit that everyone's suffering is subjective. But there does seem to be a widespread view that the poor don't suffer as much from economic downturns because they are used to being at the bottom. As Bob Dylan put it, "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. " Those with expectations of staying on top, who have grown used to living the good life, no doubt do suffer meaningfully when those expectations are shattered and they must learn to get by on incomes only five or 10 times the poverty-level income rather than 20 or 30 times. Admittedly, there doesn't yet seem to be much downside for Republican candidates pandering to the rich. For one thing, they all have billionaires and other ultra rich people funding super political action committees for them. But one of these days, the Republican nominee will be chosen and will have to compete in the general election against President Obama. And it is unlikely that the Republican nominee can win with only conservative Republican votes; he will have to reach out to those who don't necessarily believe that cutting taxes for the rich is the one and only policy that will stimulate growth. As a Januarypoll from the Pew Research Center shows, two-thirds of Americans see strong conflict between the rich and the poor, up from 47 percent in 2009. And a number of polls show that Americans support higher tax rates on millionaires by a ratio of 2-to-1 or more. I think the Republican nominee is going to have a hard time responding if all he has to say is the rich need more tax cuts to compensate them for all their suffering during the economic crisis.

单选题To which of the following statements might the author agree?

单选题The author gives the example of a tollgate in the first paragraph to indicate that

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} When they were children, Terri Schiavo's brother Bobby accidentally locked her in a suitcase. She tried so hard to get out that the suitcase jumped up and down and screamed. The scene predicted, horribly, how she would end, though by that stage she had neither walked nor talked for more than 15 years. By the time she finally died on March 31 st, her body had become a box out of which she could not escape. More than that, it had become a box out of which the United States government, Congress, the president, the governor of Florida and an army of evangelical protestors and bloggers would not let her escape. Her life, whatever its quality, became the property not merely of her husband (who had the legal right to speak for her) and her parents (who had brought her up), but of the courts, the state, and thousands of self-appointed medical and psychological experts across the country. The chief difference between her case and those of Karen Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan, much earlier victims of Persistent Vegetative State (PVS), was the existence of the internet. When posted videotapes showed Mrs Schiavo apparently smiling and communicating with those around her, doctors called these mere reflex activity, but to the layman they seemed to reveal a human being who should not be killed. On March 20th, a CAT scan of Mrs Schiavo's brain-the grey matter of the cerebral cortex more or lass gone, replaced by cerebrospinal fluid-was posted on a biog. By March 29th, it had brought 390 passionate and warring responses. All this outside interference could only exacerbate the real, cruel dilemmas of the case. After a heart attack in February 1990, when she was 26, Mrs Schiavo's brain was deprived of oxygen for five minutes and irreparably damaged. For a while, her family hoped she might be rehabilitated. Her husband Michael bought her new clothes and wheeled her round art galleries, in case her brain could respond. By 1993, he was sure it could not, and when she caught an infection he did not want her treated. Her parents disagreed, and claimed she could recover. From that point the family split, and litigation started. Each side, backed by legions of supporters, accused the other of money-grubbing and bad faith. A Florida court twice ordered Mrs Schiavo's feeding tube to be removed and Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, overruled it. The final removal of the tube, on March 18th, was followed by an extraordinary scene, in the early hours of March 21st, when George Bush signed into law a bill allowing Mrs Schiavo's parents to appeal yet again to a federal court. But by then the courts, and two-thirds of Americans, thought that enough was enough. On March 24th the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

单选题Which of the following is TRUE according to para. 5?

单选题The past few years have been busy ones for human-rights organisations. In prosecuting the so-called war on terror, many governments in Western countries where freedoms seemed secure have been tempted to nibble away at them, while doughty campaigners such as Amnesty International (国际特殊组织) also exist for defence. Yet Amnesty no longer makes the splash it used to in the rich world. The organisation is as vocal as it ever was. But some years ago it decided to dilute a traditional focus on political rights by mixing in a new category called social and economic rights. You might suppose that the more of rights you campaign for the better. Why not add pressing social and economic concerns to stuffy old political rights such as free speech and free elections? What use is a vote if you are starving? Are not access to jobs, housing, health care and food basic rights too? No: few rights are truly universal, and letting them multiply weakens them. Food, jobs and housing are certainly necessities, but there's no use to call them "rights". When a government looks someone up without a fair trial, the victim, perpetrator and remedy are pretty clear. This clarity seldom applies to social and economic "rights". Who should be educated in which subjects for how long at what cost in taxpayers' money is a political question best settled at the ballot box (投票箱). And no economic system known to man guarantees a proper job for everyone all the time. It is hardly an accident that the countries keenest to use the language of social and economic rights tend to be those that show least respect for rights of the traditional sort. And it could not be further from the truth. For people in the poor world, as for people everywhere, the most reliable method yet invented to ensure that governments provide people with social and economic necessities are called politics. That is why the rights that make open polities possible — free speech, due process, protection from arbitrary punishment— are so precious. Insisting on their enforcement is worth more than any number of grandiloquent but unenforceable declarations demanding jobs, education and housing for all. Many do-gooding outfits suffer from having too broad a focus and too narrow a base. Amnesty used to appeal to people of all political persuasions and none, and concentrate on a hard core of well-defined basic liberties. However, by trying in recent years to borrow moral authority from the campaigns and leaders of the past and lend it to the cause of social reform, Amnesty has succeeded only in muffling what was once its central message, at the very moment when governments in the West need to hear it again.