单选题"The ancient Hawaiians are astronomers", wrote Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii"s last reigning monarch, in 1897. Star watchers were among the most esteemed members of Hawaiian society. Sadly, all is not well with astronomy in Hawaii today. Protesters have erupted of over construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a giant observatory that promises to revolutionize humanity"s view of cosmos. At issue is the TMT"s planned location on Manna Kea, a dormant volcano worshiped by some Hawaiians as the piko , that connects the Hawaiian Islands to the heavens. But Manna Kea is also home to some of the world"s most powerful telescopes. Rested in the Pacific Ocean, Manna Kea"s peak rises above the bulk of our planet"s dense atmosphere, where conditions allow telescopes to obtain images of unsurpassed clarity. Oppositions to telescopes on Mauna Kea is nothing new. A small but vocal group of Hawaiians and environmentalists have long viewed their presence as disrespect for sacred land and a painful reminder of oc cupation of what was once a sovereign nation. Some blame for the current controversy belongs to astronomers. In their eagerness to build bigger telescopes, they forgot that science is not the only way of understanding the world. They did not always prioritize the protection of Mauna Kea"s fragile ecosystems or its holiness to the islands" inhabitants. Hawaiian culture is not a relic of the past; it is a living culture undergoing a renaissance today. Yet science has a cultural history, too, with roots going back to the dawn of civilization. The same curiosity to find what lies beyond the horizon that first brought early Polynesians to Hawaii"s shores inspires astronomers today to explore the heavens. Calls to disassemble all telescopes on Mauna Kea or to ban future development there ignore the reality that astronomy and Hawaiin culture both seek to answer big questions about who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Perhaps that is why we explore the starry skies, as if answering a primal calling to know ourselves and our true ancestral homes. The astronomy community is making compromises to change its use of Manna Kea. The TMT site was chosen to minimize the telescope"s visibility around the island and to avoid archaeological and environmental impact. To limit the number of telescopes on Manna Kea, old ones will be removed at the end of their lifetimes and their sites retuned to a natural state. There is no reason why everyone cannot be welcomed on Manna Kea to embrace their cultural heritage and to study the stars.

单选题The assumption of the future is not all hot air because

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Remember Second Life, the virtual world that was supposed to become almost as important as the first one? Now populated by no more than 84,000 avatars at a time, it has turned out to be a prime example of how short-lived Internet fads can be. Yet if many adults seem to have given up on virtual worlds, those that cater to children and teenagers are thriving. Several have even found a way to make money. In America, nearly 10 million children and teenagers visit virtual worlds regularly, estimates eMarketer, a market researcher-a number the firm expects to increase to 15 million by 2013．As in January, there were 112 virtual worlds designed for under-18s with another 81 in development, according to Engage Digital Media, a market research firm. All cater to different age groups and tastes. In Club Penguin, the market leader, which was bought by Disney in 2007 for a whopping $ 700 million, primary-school children can take on a penguin persona, fit out their own igloo and play games. Habbo Hotel, a service run from Finland, is a global hangout for teenagers who want to customise their own rooms and meet in public places to attend events. Gala Online, based in Silicon Valley, offers similar activities, but is visited mostly by older teens who are into Manga comics. Not a hit with advertisers, these online worlds earn most of their money from the sale of virtual goods, such as items to spruce up an avatar or a private room. They are paid for in a private currency, which members earn by participating in various activities, trading items or buying them with real dollars. This sort of stealth tax seems to work. At Gala Online, users spend more than $1 million per month on virtual items, says Craig Sherman, the firm's chief executive. Running such a virtual economy is not easy, which is why Gaia has hired a full-time economist to grapple with problems that are well known in the real world, such as inflation and an unequal distribution of wealth. There are other barriers that could limit the growth of virtual worlds for the young, but the main one is parents. Many do not want their offspring roaming virtual worlds, either because they are too commercial or are thought to be too dangerous. Keeping them safe is one of the biggest running costs, because their sponsors have to employ real people to police their realms. Youngsters are also a fickle bunch, says Simon Levene of Accel Partners, a venture- capital firm. Just as children move from one toy to another, they readily switch worlds or social networks, often without saying goodbye. Even so, Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, believes "these worlds are a training ground for the three-dimensional web". If virtual worlds for adults, which so far have been able to retain only hardcore users, manage to hang on for a few years, they may yet have a second life.

单选题When the writer says that the London Bridge Tower would not stand in Manhattan, he means

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.{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) has positioned itself as the premier champion of investor rights, regularly singling out bad managers at some of the nation's largest companies in its annual corporate-governance focus lists. And with $153 billion under management, Wall Street tends to listen when CalPERS speaks out. But the country's largest pension fund has never taken on as big a fish as it did Dec. 16, when it filed a class action against the New York Stock Exchange and seven of its member firms. CalPERS' suit charges the NYSE and specialist firms with fraud, alleging that the exchange skirted its regulatory duties and allowed its members to trade stocks at the expense of investors. The move is a major slap in the face for the NYSE's recently appointed interim Chairman John Reed. The former Citibank chairman and CEO came on board in September after the exchange's longtime head, Richard Grasso, resigned under pressure over public outrage about his excessive compensation. Reed has been widely criticized by CalPERS and other institutional investors for not including representatives of investors on the exchange's newly constituted board and not clearly separating the exchange's regulatory function from its day-to-day operations. The CalPERS lawsuit is evidence that the investment communities' dissatisfaction hasn't ebbed. "Our hopes were dashed when Mr. Reed didn't perform," says Harrigan. The suit alleges that seven specialist firms profited by abusing and overusing a series of trading tactics. The tactics, which are not currently illegal, include "penny lumping', where a firm positions itself between two orders to capture a piece of the price differential, "front running", which involves trading in advance of customers based on confidential information obtained by their orders, and "freezing" the firm's order book so that the firm can make trades on its own account first. Many of the suit's allegations are based on a previously disclosed investigation of the exchange conducted by the Securities & Exchange Commission. According to the suit, the October SEC report found "serious deficiencies in the NYSE's surveillance and investigative procedures, including a habit of ignoring repeat violations By specialist firms". The suit highlights the growing frustration that institutional investors have expressed with what they perceive as a system that needs to be revamped--if not eliminated. According to California State Comptroller Steve Westley, a CalPERS board member who participated in the Dec. 16 press conference, he has repeatedly called on the NYSE to end its use of specialist firms to facilitate trades and move to a system of openly matching of buyers and sellers. BLIND EYE? "There's no reason not to move to a fully automated exchange," Westley says. "Every exchange in the world is using such a system. The time is now for the NYSE to move into the 21st century and remove the cloud that there's self-dealing working against investors."

单选题The author writes this passage mainly to show that ______.

单选题Twenty-seven years ago, Egypt revised its secular constitution to enshrine Muslim sharia as "the principal source of legislation". To most citizens, most of the time, that seeming contradiction-between secularism and religion-has not made much difference. Nine in ten Egyptians are Sunni Muslims and expect Islam to govern such things as marriage, divorce and inheritance. Nearly all the rest profess Christianity or Judaism, faiths recognised and protected in Islam. But to the small minority who embrace other faiths, or who have tried to leave Islam, it has, until lately, made an increasingly troubling difference. Members of Egypt's 2,000-strong Bahai community, for instance, have found they cannot state their religion on the national identity cards that all Egyptians are obliged to produce to secure such things as driver's licenses, bank accounts, social insurance and state schooling. Hundreds of Coptic Christians who have converted to Islam, often to escape the Orthodox sect's ban on divorce, find they cannot revert to their original faith. In some cases, children raised as Christians have discovered that, because a divorced parent converted to Islam, they too have become officially Muslim, and cannot claim otherwise. Such restrictions on religious freedom are not directly a product of sharia, say human- rights campaigners, but rather of rigid interpretations of Islamic law by over-zealous officials. In their strict view, Bahai belief cannot be recognised as a legitimate faith, since it arose in the 19th century, long after Islam staked its claim to be the final revelation in a chain of prophecies beginning with Adam. Likewise, they brand any attempt to leave Islam, whatever the circumstances, as a form of apostasy, punishable by death. But such views have lately been challenged. Last year Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti, who is the government's highest religious adviser, declared that nowhere in Islam's sacred texts did it say that apostasy need be punished in the present rather than by God in the afterlife. In the past month, Egyptian courts have issued two rulings that, while restricted in scope, should ease some bothersome strictures. Bahais may now leave the space for religion on their identity cards blank. Twelve former Christians won a lawsuit and may now return to their original faith, on condition that their identity documents note their previous adherence to Islam. Small steps, perhaps, but they point the way towards freedom of choice and citizenship based on equal rights rather than membership of a privileged religion.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} In the dimly lit cyber-cafe at Sciences-Po, hot-house of the French elite, no Gauloise smoke fills the air, no dog-eared copies of Sartre lie on the tables. French students are doing what all students do: surfing the web via Google. Now President Jacques Chirac wants to stop this American cultural invasion by setting up a rival French search-engine. The idea was prompted by Google' s plan to put online millions of texts from American and British university libraries. If English books are threatening to swamp cyberspace, Mr Chirac will not stand idly by. He asked his culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noel Jeanneney, head of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, to do the same for French texts—and create a home-grown search-engine to browse them. Why not let Google do the job? Its French version is used for 74% of internet searches in France. The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. "I do not believe" ,wrote Mr Donnedieu de Vabres in Le Monde, "that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google' s success." This is not the first time Google has met French resistance. A court has upheld a ruling against it, in a lawsuit brought by two firms that claimed its display of rival sponsored links (Google' s chief source of revenues) constituted trademark counterfeiting. The French state news agency, Agence France-Presse ,has also filed suit against Google for copyright infringement. Googlephobia is spreading. Mr Jeanneney has talked of the "risk of crushing domination by America in defining the view that future generations have of the world. "" I have nothing in particular against Google, "he told L' Express, a magazine. "I simply note that this commercial company is the expression of the American system, in which the law of the market is king. "Advertising muscle and consumer demand should not triumph over good taste and cultural sophistication. The flaws in the French plan are obvious. If popularity cannot arbitrate, what will? Mr Jeanneney wants a "committee of experts". He appears to be serious, though the supply of French-speaking experts, or experts speaking any language for that matter, would seem to be insufficient. And if advertising is not to pay, will the taxpayer? The plan mirrors another of Mr Chirac' s pet projects: a CNNà la francaise. Over a year ago, stung by the power of Englishspeaking television news channels in the Iraq war, Mr Chirac promised to set up a French rival by the end of 2004. The project is bogged down by infighting. France ' s desire to combat English, on the web or the airwaves, is understandable. Protecting France' s tongue from its citizens' inclination to adopt English words is an ancient hobby of the ruling elite. The Académie Francaise was set up in 1635 to that end. Linguists devise translations of cyber-terms, such as arrosage (spare) or bogue (bug). Laws limit the use of English on TV—" Super Nanny" and "Star Academy" are current pests—and impose translations of English slogans in advertising. Treating the invasion of English as a market failure that must be corrected by the state may look clumsy. In France it is just business as usual.

单选题Which of the following is true concerning stress on managers?

单选题The term "oomph" ( Line 4, Paragraph 3 ) in the text denotes

单选题If soldiering was for the money, the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS) would have disintegrated in recent years. Such has been the explosion in private military companies (PMCs) that they employ an estimated 30 000 in Iraq alone -- and no government can match their fat salaries. A young SAS trooper earns about￡ 2,000($3 500) a month; on the "circuit", as soldiers call the private world, he could get ￡15 000. Why would he not? For reasons both warm-hearted and cool-headed. First, for love of regiment and comrades, bonds that tend to be tightest in the most select units. Second, for the operational support, notably field medicine, and the security, including life assurance and pension, that come with the queen's paltry shilling. Although there has been no haemorrhaging of special force (SF) fighters to the private sector, there has been enough of a trickle to cause official unease. A memo recently circulated in the Ministry of Defence detailed the loss of 24 SF senior non-commissioned officers to private companies in the past year. All had completed 22 years of service, and so were eligible for a full pension, and near the end of their careers. Yet there is now a shortage of hard-bitten veterans to fill training and other jobs earmarked for them, under a system for retaining them known as "continuance." America has responded to the problem by throwing cash at it, offering incentives of up to $150 000 to sign new contracts. The Ministry of Defence has found a cheaper ploy. It has spread the story of two British PMC employees, recently killed in Iraq, whose bodies were left rotting in the sun;

单选题Are teens and young adults more narcissistic (自恋的) today than in the past? That's the view of a California researcher who studies (1) people. In her new book, The Narcissism (2) : Living in the Age of Entitlement, psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and (3) W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia say research shows (4) young people today have "narcissistic traits" than in (5) generations. Such traits, Twenge says, include a very. (6) and inflated sense of self, which is (7) by a preoccupation with MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. "We've been on this self-admiration cultural (8) for a long time," Twenge says. (9) Twenge's take on today's young people isn't universal. Studies by other researchers, including Canadian (10) Dr. Kali of the University of Western Ontario, have used the same data but found (11) results. "They put a different (12) on it," Kali says. Twenge's studies have found more narcissistic traits and a (13) rate of increase among college students today, but Kali found that students' narcissism was (14) greater in 2006 than in 1976. Twenge's most recent paper studied the same data as Kali--more than 20 000 college students from 2002 to 2007. (15) researchers used the Narcissistic Personality Inventory to measure narcissistic (16) and findings by both have been (17) in peerreviewed journals. Twenge's book (18) just a month after The Mirror Effect : How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America, a book co-written by behavioral (19) Drew Pinsky, (20) suggested that a celebrity-obsessed culture is causing more narcissism.

单选题Ask just about any high school senior or junior in America—or their parents—and they"ll tell you that getting into a selective college is harder than it used to be. They"re right about that. But the reasons for the newfound difficulty are not well understood. Population growth plays a role, but the number of teenagers is not too much higher than it was 30 years ago, when the youngest baby boomers were still applying to college. And while many more Americans attend college than in the past, most of the growth has occurred at colleges with relatively few resources and high dropout rates, which bear little resemblance to the elites. So what else is going on? One overlooked factor is that top colleges are admitting fewer American students than they did a generation ago. Colleges have globalized over that time, deliberately increasing the share of their student bodies that come from overseas and leaving fewer slots for applicants from the United States. For American teenagers, it really is harder to get into Harvard—or Yale, Stanford, Brown, Boston College or many other elite colleges—than it was when today"s 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds were applying. The number of spots filled by American students at Harvard, after adjusting for the size of the teenage population nationwide, has dropped 27 percent since 1994. At Yale and Dartmouth, the decline has been 24 percent. At Carleton, it"s 22 percent. At Notre Dame and Princeton, it is 14 percent. This globalization obviously brings some big benefits. It has exposed American students to perspectives that our proudly parochial country often does not provide in childhood. Yet the way in which American colleges have globalized comes with costs, too. For one thing, the rise in foreign students has complicated the colleges" stated efforts to make their classes more economically diverse. Foreign students often receive insufficient financial aid and tend to be from well-off families. For another thing, the country"s most selective colleges have effectively shrunk as far as American students are concerned, during the same span that many students and their parents are spending more time obsessing over getting into one. Either way, the research emphasizes a problem with the way colleges have globalized. With only a handful of exceptions (including Harvard, Amherst, M.I.T. and Yale), colleges have not tried hard to recruit an economically diverse group of foreign students. The students instead have become a revenue source.