单选题Directions:Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. For much of this week, New York has been caught up in an unstoppable heat wave. At times like this, it's hard not to imagine the worst-case {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}. What if the world's air-conditioners just stopped working? What would we do then? Air-conditioning has {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}the polarity of summer: it has us fleeing inside during hot weather, {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}we used to flee outside, which might have been more fun, and was certainly more {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Arthur Miller's "Before Air-Conditioning" (1998)—probably the definitive New Yorker essay on this subject-describes the way New Yorkers would {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}together out-of-doors. During his childhood, Miller writes, in the twenties, "There were still elevated trains...Desperate people, unable to {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}their apartments, would {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}pay a nickel and ride around aimlessly for a couple of hours to cool off." At night, Central Park "was full of hundreds of people who slept on the grass. Babies cried in the darkness, men's deep voices {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}, and a woman let out a(n) {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}high laugh beside the lake." It was still hot in the park, and it was crowded, but the {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}of the space made the heat easier to {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}. The {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}and spread of air-conditioning, meanwhile, put {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}relief the habits of the pre-air-conditioning {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}. In a comment from July 4, 1959, A. J. Liebling {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}how "the dodges for coping with the heat that New Yorkers learned in three centuries of summer have become {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}, and in some cases hazardous. " New York buildings, Liebling complained, were now "twenty degrees colder in summer than in winter, when they are {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}to the needs of a woman who is going to shed a mink coat the {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}she gets inside, and is wearing nothing much underneath it." Nowadays, air-conditioners are cheap and {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}. And yet there are still summer days like these- days when it's {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}hot that the heat is almost all you can think about.

单选题What contribution does the author feel people must make now?

单选题The Federal Communications Commission is not alone in worrying about television stations that air corporate advertisements masquerading as news stories. In fact, the FCC requires that broadcast stations disclose the corporate backers of "video news releases" or face a maximum fine of $32,500 for each violation. Enough violations and a station could lose its license. The FCC sets out a clear policy: All outside news reporting must be identified, disclosing the source of any video news release aired on a news program. There are occasional declines. A nonprofit consumer watchdog group reported to the FCC that 77 stations broadcast video features about products from 49 companies without pointing out that they were produced by public relations firms representing these corporations. Public relations firms have one goal: to make their video news releases look as if they are legitimate news reports, not propaganda. However, PR-produced video news releases merely are the tip of the iceberg. Ever since newspapers began, special-interest groups have tried to influence the quality and quantity of the news printed. Often, in exchange for advertising revenue, newspapers would print glowing stories of their sponsors and suppress any news that might hurt their heavy advertisers. Those without the ability to inform the press, either through news releases or contacts usually are ignored unless they commit a crime or act in attention-getting ways. For most of the 20th century, women and people of color found it almost impossible to break the special-interest news barriers. Their stories were ignored unless there was a sensational or unique element. Usually, though, items concerning these minorities required an enormous wrongdoing, such as the murder of someone in the white community or some attack on the status quo that threatened the peace and quiet, as well as the productivity, of a neighborhood. There have been splendid exceptions, but not many. One reason the Hispanic news media has been so successful is that it caters to its audience in the same manner all media does. While its bias may seem different, it actually is the same bias all media has: an overwhelming concern to keep its supporters happy. So, while the hue and cry over PR-created video news releases are well and good, they really do not attack the problem of biased news, and appeals to a specific group that shares the same prejudices and concerns about the present and future. All of this is one key reason Americans so often are surprised when the news outlets are forced to report stories that do not please advertisers or consumers. Better to continue, when possible, a steady supply of news about the latest celebrity baby or yet another piece about sex offenders or restaurant health violations.

单选题The mechanic address from the retired brigadier's wife is an example of______

单选题What impact can mobile phones have on their users' health? Many people worry about the supposed ill effects caused by radiation from handsets and base stations, (1) the lack of credible evidence of any harm. But evidence for the beneficial effects of mobile phones on health is rather more (2) Indeed, a systematic review (3) out by Rifat Atun and his colleagues at Imperial College, rounds up 150 (4) of the use of text-messaging in the (5) of health care. These uses (6) three categories: efficiency gains; public-health gains; and direct benefits to patients by (7) text-messaging into treatment regimes. Using texting to (8) efficiency is not profound science, but big savings can be achieved. Several (9) carried out in England have found that the use of text-messaging reminders (10) the number of missed appointments with family doctors by 26-39%, and the number of missed hospital appointments by 33-50%. If such schemes were (11) nationally, this would translate (12) annual savings of ￡256-364 million. Text messages can also be a good way to deliver public-health information, particularly to groups (13) are hard to reach by other means. Text messages have been used in India to (14) people about the World Health Organization's strategy to control lung disease. In Iraq, text messages were used to support a (15) to immunize nearly 5 million children (16) paralysis. (17) , there are the uses of text-messaging as part of a treatment regime. These involve sending reminders to patients to (18) their medicine, or to encourage accordance with exercise regimes. However, Dr. Rifat notes that the evidence for the effectiveness of such schemes is generally (19) , and more quantitative research is (20)

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Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behaviour is regarded as "all too human," with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey , as well. The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of "goods and services" than males. Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr. Brosnan"s and Dr. de Waal"s study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to exchange pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different. In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (without an actual monkey to eat it) was enough to induce resentment in a female capuchin. The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group-living species. Such cooperation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.

单选题Although it is the elderly and the young infants who get the siekest from the flu, it is young children who are most susceptible. In community flu outbreaks, it is not unusual for 30 to 40 percent of children to get the infection, perhaps twice the rate of adult infection. Flu spreads rapidly from child to child for a number of reasons. First, flu is spread by small respiratory droplets that are coughed or sneezed and float in the air. A well child can catch the flu from being in the same classroom or child care center with an ill child without them ever touching each other. (Contrast this with the way colds are usually spread, by large droplets on people's hands, making good hand washing an effective preventive strategy. )Also, flu appears to be contagious even the clay before symptoms begin, and because children don't get as sick as adults with the flu, they other stay in school or clay-care long enough to spread the disease to their classmates. While few otherwise healthy children have any serious consequences from the flu, it is these children that are the major conduit by which flu spreads through the community and into households. In ordinary households, adults are more frequently infected by children than by other adults. And it is adults with chronic diseases, and the elderly—particularly grandparents—that suffer the major consequences of this virus. One author has aptly referred to children as the "Typhoid Mary's" of the flu. Flu Vaccine is the best defense against the flu. It is recommended for all adults over the age of 65, or over the age of 50 if there are sufficient supplies, and for individuals of any age if they are at high risk. Those high risk individuals would include anyone with heart or lung disease, including asthma, and people with diabetes, chronic kidney disease or other chronic conditions. But recognizing that it is children who spread flu to households, it can be strongly argued to offer flu vaccine to healthy children who are in regular contact with other fanfily members who are at high risk by virtue of their age or underlying illnesses. This will help keep flu out of these households. Even if the grandparent has had flu vaccine, immunizing the grandchildren makes sense because flu vaccine is more reliably protective in younger healthier individuals. In addition, there are about 8 million children in the U. S. who have underlying conditions—most notably asthma—that make them eligible for flu vaccine. Regrettably, three out of four of these children end up ever getting the flu vaccine.

单选题We learn from the text that traffic planners are more concerned about

单选题According to experts, the test for AIDS is

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research showing that senior women professors in the institute's school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up elsewhere. One study conducted in Sweden, of all places--showed that female medical-research scientists had to be twice as good as men to win research grants. These pieces of work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British universities. Sara Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia's school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey of over 7 000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year's meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is around ￡ 1 500 ($ 2850 ) a year. That is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men's and women's lives mean the gap is caused by something else; women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr. Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of the hierarchy, Male professors, for example, earn over ￡ 4 000 a year more than female ones. To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr. Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantia123% gap in pay, which Dr. Connolly attributes to discrimination. Besides pay, her study also looked at the "glass-ceiling" effect--namely that at all stages of a woman' s career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman to settle into a professorial chair: Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr. Connolly's compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts, than do their sisters in industry or research institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words, delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia does.

单选题In the third paragraph the author uses the example of the single mother to indicate that faith

单选题We may infer from the passage that the author' s attitude towards the whole set-up is ______.

单选题In a purely biological sense, fear begins with the body"s system for reacting to things that can harm us—the so-called fight-or-flight response. "An animal that can"t detect danger can"t stay alive," says Joseph LeDoux. Like animals, humans evolved with an elaborate mechanism for processing information about potential threats. At its core is a cluster of neurons deep in the brain known as the amygdala. LeDoux studies the way animals and humans respond to threats to understand how we form memories of significant events in our lives. The amygdala receives input from many parts of the brain, including regions responsible for retrieving memories. Using this information, the amygdala appraises a situation—I think this charging dog wants to bite me—and triggers a response by radiating nerve signals throughout the body. These signals produce the familiar signs of distress: trembling, perspiration and fast-moving feet, just to name three. This fear mechanism is critical to the survival of all animals, but no one can say for sure whether beasts other than humans know they"re afraid. That is, as LeDoux says, "if you put that system into a brain that has consciousness, then you get the feeling of fear." Humans, says Edward M. Hallowell, have the ability to call up images of bad things that happened in the past and to anticipate future events. Combine these higher thought processes with our hardwired danger-detection systems, and you get a near-universal human phenomenon: worry. That"s not necessarily a bad thing, says Hallowell. "When used properly, worry is an incredible device," he says. After all, a little healthy worrying is okay if it leads to constructive action—like having a doctor look at that weird spot on your back. Hallowell insists, though, that there"s a right way to worry. "Never do it alone, get the facts and then make a plan." He says. Most of us have survived a recession, so we"re familiar with the belt-tightening strategies needed to survive a slump. Unfortunately, few of us have much experience dealing with the threat of terrorism, so it"s been difficult to get fact about how we should respond. That"s why Hallowell believes it was okay for people to indulge some extreme worries last fall by asking doctors for Cipro and buying gas masks.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C, and D on ANSWER SHEET 1. As one works with color in a practical or experimental way, one is impressed by two apparently unrelated facts. Color as seen is a mobile, changeable thing{{U}} (1) {{/U}}to a large extent on the relationship of the color{{U}} (2) {{/U}}other colors{{U}} (3) {{/U}}simultaneously. It is not{{U}} (4) {{/U}}in its relation to the direct stimulus which{{U}} (5) {{/U}}it. On the other hand, the properties of surfaces that give{{U}} (6) {{/U}}to color do not seem to change greatly under a wide variety of illumination color, usually (but not always) looking much the same in artificial light as in daylight. Both of these effects seem to be{{U}} (7) {{/U}}in large part to the mechanism of color{{U}} (8) {{/U}}. When the eye is{{U}} (9) {{/U}}to a colored area, there is an immediate readjustment of the{{U}} (10) {{/U}} of the eye to color in and around the area{{U}} (11) {{/U}}. This readjustment does not promptly affect the color seen but usually does affect the next area to which the{{U}} (12) {{/U}}is shifted. The longer the time of viewing, the higher the{{U}} (13) {{/U}}, and the larger the area, the greater the effect will be{{U}} (14) {{/U}}its persistence in the{{U}} (15) {{/U}}viewing situation. As indicated by the work of Wright and Schouten, it appears that, at{{U}} (16) {{/U}}for a first approximation, full adaptation takes place over{{U}} (17) {{/U}}time if the adapting source is moderately bright and the eye has been in{{U}} (18) {{/U}} darkness just previously. Also,{{U}} (19) {{/U}}of the persistence of the effect if the eye is shifted around from one object to another, all of which are at similar brightness or have similar colors, the adaptation will tend to become{{U}} (20) {{/U}}over the whole eye.