单选题Education Secretary Arne Duncan is joining forces with two unlikely allies, the Rev. A1 Sharpton and Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to push cities to fix failing schools. The trio will visit Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore later this year. They plan to add more stops as their tour progresses. "These are cities that have real challenges but also tremendous hope and opportunity," Duncan told reporters on a conference call Thursday. The idea came from a meeting they had with President Barack Obama in May at the White House. Education is high on Obama"s priority list. He is seeking to boost achievement, keep kids from dropping out of high school and push every student to pursue some form of higher education. The president has vowed to make the United States the world leader in the number of people who graduate from college. He argues that students who do better in school will help themselves in a work force that increasingly depends on high-skilled jobs, and that the country will benefit as well. Obama discussed education issues in an interview with Damon Weaver, an 11-year-old Florida student. "On Sept. 8, when young people across the country will have just started or are about to go back to school, I"m going to be making a big speech to young people all across the country about the importance of education, the importance of staying in school, how we want to improve our education system and why it"s so important for the country," Obama said. Sharpton, the liberal Democrat and community activist, said teachers and administrators aren"t the only ones responsible for improving schools. "The parents need to be challenged with the message of "no excuses"," Sharpton said. Interviewed on NBC"s Today show Friday, Gingrich and Sharpton were asked how they had agreed to work together on education in view of the many differences they"ve had on other issues. "I think that he has it exactly right, that education has to be the No. 1 civil right of the 21st century and I"ve been passionate about reforming education," Gingrich said. "And we can"t get it done as a partisan issue." Sharpton said the time has come to "change the conversation...to say we need to put everybody"s hands on the table". Gingrich also said he believes that "if there"s anything Americans should be mature enough about to have a decent conversation, it"s the education of their children". He applauded Obama for showing "real courage on the issue of charter schools". Obama wants to increase the number of charter schools, which have a controversial history and are a divisive issue for his party"s base.

单选题 The problems of the elderly are attracting greater attention largely because the American population is growing steadily older as the proportion of its aged members increase. At the time of the first United States census in 1790, half of the people in the country were 16 or younger. By the turn of the present century the median age of the population had risen to 22.9 years; by 1970, it was 27.7 ; and by 1977 it had reached 28.9 ; the median age will reach 35 by the year 2000, and will approach 40 by the year 2030. In time the burden of the years affects even the healthiest individual. Aging is accompanied by physiological changes that are not necessarily the result of any disease: apart from the more obvious signs of age—such as baldness, wrinkling, changes in body form, and stiffness of limbs—there is a general process of atrophy of the cells and gradual degeneration. However, the rate of physiological aging varies greatly from one person to another. Some people show noticeable signs of aging as early as fifty. Others seem relatively young and vital at seventy, and may even continue to enjoy a vigorous sex life. In general, however, ill health becomes more common with advancing age. More than three quarters of those over sixty-five suffer from some chronic health condition. But ill health need not have only physiological causes; it can have social and psychological causes as well. People tend to follow social expectations to fill the roles that are offered to them. In a sense, all we offer the aged is a sick role—the role of the infirm person who has outlived his or her usefulness to society. An urbanized, industrialized society such as the United States is oriented toward youth, mobility, and activity. It does little to integrate the old into the social structure. Unlike the elders in a traditional society, the American aged can no longer lay automatic claim on their kin for support and social participation; on the contrary, they are more likely to have to try not to be a "nuisance" to their now independent adult offspring. Nor are they regarded as the wisest members of the community as the elders in a traditional society would be; instead, any advice they give is likely to be considered irrelevant in a changing world about which their descendants consider themselves much better informed. In America, childhood is romanticised, youth is idolised, middle age does the work, wields the power and pays the bills, and old age gets little or nothing for what it has already done. For many elderly Americans old age is a tragedy, a period of quiet despair, deprivation, desolation and muted rage. The tragedy of old age is not that each of us must grow old and die but that the process of doing so has been made unnecessarily painful, humiliating and isolating through insensitivity, ignorance, and poverty.

单选题Unwillingness to face death is

单选题It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most right-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa. And the same competitive advantage is enjoyed by left-handers in other sports, such as tennis and cricket. The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialization of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans ( and all other vertebrate animals ) underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180~ relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain (and thus the right body) is usually dominant. And on average, lefthanders are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond, of the University of Montpellier Ⅱ , in France, think they know the answer. As they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, there is a clue in the advantage seen in boxing. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is true, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond set out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modem societies often involves the use of technology, notably firearms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond decided to confine their investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence ( by number of homicides) in traditional societies. By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, the two researchers found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1 000 inhabitants per year (compared with, for example, 0.068 in New York). And, according to Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0. 013 murders per 1 000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed. While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister".

单选题As any diplomat from Britain, Austria or Turkey can tell you, handling the legacy of a vanished, far-flung empire is a tricky business. But for Georgia, the gap between old glory and present vulnerability is especially wide. Today's Georgia is diminished by war, buffeted by geopolitics and recovering from post-Soviet chaos. But 800 years ago the country was a mighty military, cultural and ecclesiastical force. Its greatest monarch, Queen Tamara, defeated many foes (including her first husband) and built fine monuments. In her time, Georgia also had a big stake in the Christian life of the Holy Land. From Jerusalem to the Balkans, Georgia's priests, artists and church-builders were active and respected. So too were its poets, like Shota Rustaveli, the national bard who dedicated an epic to his beloved queen. In between seeking western aid and coping with power cuts, modern Georgia has pledged to keep a wary eye on every place where churches, inscriptions and frescoes testify to its golden age. That includes Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and above all, Israel. Last year, Georgians were enraged when a fresco of Rustaveli, in a Jerusalem church under the care of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, was defaced, then badly restored. This year, a better restoration was done, but Georgians now want a promise that in all future restoration their own experts can take part. They also want to stop the seepage of Georgian frescoes and icons, supposedly under the Patriarchate's care, on to the art market. Several times, Georgia has had to use its meagre resources to buy back pieces of the national heritage. The hope is that things will improve with the recent election of a new Jerusalem Patriarch, after his predecessor was ousted under a cloud of scandal. Georgia's ties with Israel are good, thanks to a thriving Georgian-Jewish community with happy memories of its homeland. Georgia also gets along with Greece, amid a fug of sentimentality over legends about the Argonauts that link the two nations. But can these warm, fuzzy feelings translate into better protection for an ancient culture? That will be a challenge for Geld Bezhuashvili, who succeeds Salome Zourabichvili, the French-born diplomat who was sacked, after a power struggle, as Georgian foreign minister on October 19th.

单选题With Airbus' giant A380 airliner about to take to the skies, you might think planes could not get much bigger-and you would be right. For a given design, it turns (1) , there comes a point where the wings become too heavy to generate (2) lift to carry their own weight. (3) a new way of designing and making materials could (4) that problem. Two engineers (5) University College London have devised all innovative way to customise and control the (6) of a material throughout its three-dimensional structure. In the (7) of a wing, this would make possible a material that is dense, strong and load-bearing at one end, close to the fuselage, (8) the extremities could be made less dense, lighter and more (9) . It is like making bespoke materials, (10) you can customise the physical properties of every cubic millimetre of a structure. The new technique combines existing technologies in a(n) (11) way, It starts by using finite-element-analysis software, of the type commonly used by engineers, (12) a virtual prototype of the object. The software models the stresses and strains that the object will need to (13) throughout its structure. Using this information it is then (14) to calculate the precise forces acting on millions of smaller subsections of the structure. (15) of these subsections is (16) treated as a separate object with its own set of forces acting on it-and each subsection (17) for a different microstructure to absorb those local forces. Designing so many microstructures manually (18) be a huge task, so the researchers apply an optimisation program, called a genetic algorithm, (19) . This uses a process of randomisation and trial-and-error to search the vast number of possible microstructures to find the most (20) design for each subsection.

单选题The world is undergoing tremendous changes. The rise of globalization, both an economic and cultural trend that has swept throughout the world, has forged new ground as we enter the 21st century. But are the effects of globalization always positive? Some say no. Michael Tenet, head of the International Institute for Foreign Relations in Atlanta, is worried about current resentment throughout the world toward the rise of globalization. "Ever since the 1980s and the economic collapse of the Asian Tigers in the late 1990s, there has been a re-evaluation of the role of globalization as a force for good," he said. "Incomes in many countries has declined and the gap between the most rich and the most poor has been aggravated. Without further intervention by governments, we could see a tragedy expressed in an increased level of poverty throughout the Latin America and Asia. " Yet George Frank, an influential economist who works on Wall Street, sees no such danger. "Economic liberalization, increased transparency and market-based reforms have positive effect in the long run, even if market mechanisms can produce short-term destabilization problems," he said. "What is most important is that barriers to trade continue to fall so that active competition for consumer goods reduces prices and in turn raises the average level of income. " Others feel that globalization"s cultural impact may be more important than its economic implications. Janice Yawee, a native of Africa, feels strongly that globalization is undermining her local culture and language. "Most of the world"s dialects will become extinct under globalization. We"re paving the world with McDonald"s and English slang. It tears me up inside," she said. Governments of different countries have had mixed responses to the wave of globalization. The United States is generally seen as an active proponent of greater free trade, and it certainly has enormous cultural influence by virtue of its near monopoly on worldwide entertainment. But other countries, most notably in Europe and developing nations, have sought to reduce the impact that globalization has on their domestic affairs. "When I was a boy we had very little to speak of," says one Singaporean resident. "Now our country has developed into a booming hub for international finance. " Others, however, are not so optimistic. "Globalization is an evil force that must be halted," a union official at a car plant in Detroit recently commented, "It"s sucking away jobs and killing the spirit of our country. "

单选题Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the great disparity between the native population of America in 1492--new estimates of which jump as high as 100 million, or approximately one-sixth of the human race at that time--and the few million full-blooded Native Americans alive at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that chronic disease was an important factor in the sharp decline, and it is highly probable that the greatest killer was epidemic disease, especially as manifested in virgin-soil epidemics. Virgin-soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless. That virgin-soil epidemics were important in American history is strongly indicated by evidence that a number of dangerous maladies--smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more--were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World. The effects of their sudden introduction are demonstrated in the early chronicles of America, which contain reports of horrible epidemics and steep population declines, confirmed in many cases by quantitative analyzes of Spanish tribute records and other sources. The evidence provided by the documents of British and French colonies is not as definitive because the conquerors of those areas did not establish permanent settlements and began to keep continuous records until the seventeenth century, by which time the worst epidemics had probably already taken place. Furthermore, the British tended to drive the native populations away, rather than to enslave them as the Spaniards did, so that the epidemics of British America occurred beyond the range of colonists" direct observation. Even so, the surviving records of North America do contain references to deadly epidemics among the native population. In 1616--1619 an epidemic, possibly of pneumonic plague, swept coastal New England, killing as many as nine out of ten, During the 1630"s smallpox, the disease most fatal to the Native American people, eliminated half the population of the Huron and Iroquois confederations. In the 1820"s fever ruined the people of the Columbia River area, killing eight out of ten of them. Unfortunately, the documentation of these and other epidemics is slight and frequently unreliable, and it is necessary to supplement what little we do know with evidence from recent epidemics among Native Americans. For example, in 1952 an outbreak of measles among the Native American inhabitants of Ungava Bay, Quebec, affected 99 percent of the population and killed 7 percent, even though some had the benefit of modern medicine. Cases such as this demonstrate that even diseases that are not normally fatal can have destroying consequences when they strike an immunologically defenseless community.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (40 points){{B}}Text 1{{/B}} September 11th 2001 drew the transatlantic alliance together; but the mood did not last, and over the five years since it has pulled ever further apart. A recent poll for the German Marshall Fund shows that 57% of Europeans regard American leadership in world affairs as "undesirable". The Iraq war is mainly to blame. But there is another and more intractable reason for the growing division: God. Europeans worry that American foreign policy under George Bush is too influenced by religion. The "holy warriors" who hijacked the planes on September 11th reintroduced God into international affairs in the most dramatic of ways. It seems that George Bush is replying in kind, encouraging a clash of religions that could spell global catastrophe. Dominique Moisi, a special adviser at the French Institute for International Relations, argues that "the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening. We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare." Josef Braml, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, complains that in America "religious attitudes have more of an influence on political choices than in any other western democracy." The notion that America is too influenced by religion is not confined to the elites.Three in five French people and nearly as many Dutch think that Americans are too religious—and that religion skews what should be secular decisions. Europeans who think that America is "too religious" are more inclined to anti-Americanism than their fellow countrymen. 38% of Britons have an unfavourable view of America, but that number rises to 50% among people who are wary of American religiosity. Is America engaged in a faith-based foreign policy? Religion certainly exerts a growing influence on its actions in the world, but in ways more subtle and complicated than Europeans imagine. It is true that America is undergoing a religious revival "Hot" religions such as evangelical Protestantism and hardline Catholicism are growing rapidly while "cool" mainline versions of Christianity are declining. It is also true that the Republican Party is being reshaped by this revival. Self-identified evangelicals provided almost 40% of Mr. Bush's vote in 2004; if you add in other theological conservatives, such as Mormons and traditional Catholics, that number rises closer to 60%. All six top Republican leaders in the Senate have earned 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition. It is also true that Mr. Bush frequently uses religious rhetoric when talking of foreign affairs. On September 12th he was at it again, telling a group of conservative journalists that he sees the war on terror as "a confrontation between good and evil", and remarking, "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening" (in other words, an outbreak of Christian evangelical fervour, of the sort that has swept across America at least twice before). And Christian America overall is taking a bigger interest in foreign policy. New voices are being heard, Such as Sam Brownback, a conservative senator from Kansas who has led the fight against genocide in Darfur, and Rick Warren, the author of a bestseller called The Purpose-Driven Life, who is sending 2 000 missionaries to Rwanda. Finally, it is true that religious figures have done some pretty outrageous things. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela. Lieu- tenant-General William "Jerry" Boykin, deputy under-secretary of defence for intelligence, toured the country telling Christian groups that radical Muslims hate America "because we' re a Christian nation and the enemy is a guy named Satan". He often wore uniform.

单选题"Equal Justice Under Law,' reads the motto atop the U.S. Supreme Court building. The words am lofty, but for the thousands of people who trudge through the criminal-justice system daily and who speak no English, the phrase means legally nothing. For many of these defendants, the words are also legally empty. American justice for those who do not comprehend English is "anything but uniform, let alone understandable. There are no nationwide standards for court interpreters, little training and virtually no monitoring. "Everybody gets a piece of due process," says David Fellmeth, a senior court interpreter in New York city. "But how big a piece depends on the interpreter." Horror stories regularly fill court dockets. In a New York federal court, a translated undercover wire quotes a Cuban defendant: "I don' t even have the ten kilos." The defendant means kilos of currency (Cuban cents), but the translated statement suggests kilograms of drugs. In a New Jersey homicide trial, the prosecutor asks whether the testimony of a witness is lengthier than the translation. "Yes," responds the Polish interpreter, "but everything else was not important." Congress tried to surmount the language barriers in the federal courts by passing legislation eleven years ago authorizing Government-paid interpreters for those who do not speak English. So far, though, only 308 people have passed the rigorous Spanish-only federal certification process—a cadre far too small to handle the 43,000 annual requests for interpreters in 60 languages. The situation in the states is breaker. Last year Cook County, IH, processed 40,000 requests, and the New York courts sought out interpreters 250 times a day. As in the federal system, Spanish is the language most in demand. Only a handful of states test their interpreters for language skills. Thus in many local courts, translation may be a free-lance project for the secretary who speaks a little French or a favor requested from a relative of the defendant. "A family member is the worst person you can use," says Maureen Dunn, an interpreter for the deaf. "They have their own side of the story, and they add and omit things." Besides, interpretation is a sophisticated art. It demands not only a broad vocabulary and instant recall but also the ability to reproduce tone and nuance and a good working knowledge of street slang. "Most people believe that if you are bilingual, you can interpret," says Jack Leeth of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. "That's about as true as saying that if you have two hands, you can automatically be a concert pianist." Professional interpreters are among the first to admit the sad state of translation in the courts. They are often relegated to clerical status, with low pay, and asked to work without time to prepare. Says New York interpreter Gabriel Felix: "We could use a central administrator, dictionaries and in some courts a place to hang our coats, a chair and a desk. " Some jurisdictions are trying to make improvements. New York and New Jersey are broadening their testing and sending their interpreters to school for further training. The Federal Government is working on new requirements for Navajo and Haitian-Creole interpreters. And in Los Angeles a federal lawsuit is demanding certified interpreters in immigration proceedings. For now, however, the quality of court interpreting around the country depends on the luck of the draw.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Many countries have a tradition of inviting foreigners to rule them. The English called in William of Orange in 1688, and, depending on your interpretation of history, William of Normandy in 1066. Both did rather a good job. Returning the compliment, Albania asked a well-bred Englishman called Aubgrey Herbert to be their king in the 1920s. He refused-and they ended up with several coves called Zog. America, the country of immigrants, has no truck with imported foreign talent. Article two of the constitution says that "no person except a natural-born citizen.., shall be eligible to the office of the president". This is now being challenged by a particularly irresistible immigrant: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Barely a year has passed since the erstwhile cyborg swept to victory in California's recall election, yet there is already an Amend-for-Arnold campaign collecting signatures to let the Austrian-born governor have a go at the White House. George Bush senior has weighed in on his behalf. There are several "Arnold amendments" in Congress. one allows foreigners who have been naturalized citizens for 20 years to become president. (The Austrian became American in 1983.) It is easy to dismiss the hoopla as another regrettable example of loopy celebrity politics. Mr. Schwarzenegger has made a decent start as governor, but he has done little, as yet, to change the structure of his dysfunctional state. Indeed, even if the law were changed, he could well be elbowed aside by another incomer, this time from Canada. the Democratic governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, who appears to have fewer skeletons in her closet than the hedonistic actor. Moreover, changing the American constitution is no doddle. It has happened only 17 times since 1791 (when the first ten amendments were codified as the bill of rights). To change the constitution, an amendment has to be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and then to be ratified by three-quarters of the 50 states. The Arnold amendment is hardly in the same category as abolishing slavery or giving women the vote. And, as some wags point out, Austrian imports have a pretty dodgy record of running military superpowers.