单选题Being smart is the most expensive thing we do. Not in terms of money, but in a currency that is vital to all living things: energy. One study found that newborn humans spend close to 90 percent of their calories on building and running their brains. (Even as adults, our brains consume as much as a quarter of our energy.) If, during childhood, when the brain is being built, some unexpected energy cost comes along, the brain will suffer. Infectious disease is a factor that may rob large amounts of energy away from a developing brain. A great deal of research has shown that average IQ varies around the world, both across nations and within them. Higher IQ predicts a wide range of important factors, including better grades in school, a higher level of education, better health, better job performance, higher wages, and reduced risk of obesity. So having a better understanding of variations in intelligence might yield a greater understanding of these other issues as well. In a study in 2010, it was found that, among all the factors that affect intelligence, infectious disease works as the best predictor of the bunch. A recent study by Christopher Hassall and Thomas Sherratt repeated the study using more sophisticated statistical methods, and concluded that infectious disease may be the only really important predictor of average national IQ. Support for this hypothesis comes not only from cross-national studies, but from studies of individuals. There have been many studies, for example, showing that children infected with intestinal worms have lower IQ later in life. Another study by Atheendar Venkataramani found that regions in Mexico that were the target of malaria eradication programs had higher average IQ than those that were not. In practical terms, however, this means that human intelligence is mutable. If differences in IQ across the world are largely due to exposure to infectious disease during childhood, then reducing exposure to disease should increase IQ. Despite the strength of the findings, the study was not without its limitations. The researchers did their best to control for the effects of education. But what they really needed was to repeat their analysis across regions within a single nation, preferably one with standardized, compulsory education. The nation they chose was the United States. Average IQ varies in the states. Again, infectious disease was an excellent predictor of average state IQ. The states with the five lowest average IQ all have higher levels of infectious disease than the states with the five highest average IQ, and the relationship was good across all of the states in between. So far, the evidence suggests that infectious disease is a primary cause of the global variation in human intelligence. Since this is a developmental cause, rather than a genetic one, it's good news for anyone who is interested in reducing global inequality associated with IQ. It will allow people interested in using this information to raise the IQ of people around the world to target their efforts most effectively and efficiently.

单选题The foremost motivation behind the low-power radio initiative was to______.

单选题For months the Japanese searched fitfully for the right word to describe what was happening. At the Bank of Japan, the nation's central bank, officials spoke of "an adjustment phase.' Prime Minister admitted only to "a difficult situation." The Economic Planning Agency, the government's record keeper, referred delicately to a "retreat." Then two weeks ago, for the first time since 1997, the agency dropped its boilerplate reference to the "expansion" from its closely watched Monthly Economic Report, and the word game was over. Japan's economy, the world's second largest, conceded the experts, was in recession. That admission confirmed the bad news businessmen had been reading in their spreadsheets for several months. "In 2001 one market after another turned bad," says Yoshihiko Wakamoto, senior vice president of Toshiba Corp., which now admits that its pretax profits for fiscal 2001, ending March 31, may be down a whopping 42%. In April, when many Japanese companies announce their results for 2001 fiscal year, most will report declining profits. Blue chips like Sony, NEC and Matsushita have all experienced drops of over 40% in pretax profits. Japan's security houses, hit by declining commissions from a falling stock market, will announce even more dramatic drops. Nomura Securities, once Japan's most profitable company, is talking about an 80% decline in profits. Auto manufacturers, banks, airlines, steel companies, department stores--all are in a slump. Technically, what is happening to the Japanese economy does not meet American criteria for a recession, normally defined as at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. While economic growth has slowed in Japan, it has not ceased. Government economists are predicting a 3.5% increase in GNP for 2002. Outside experts are not so optimistic. But nearly everyone agrees that GNP growth in Japan is unlikely to slip into negative numbers, as it did last year in the U. S. and Britain. "There's no question that we are in a recession," pronounces Kunio Miyamoto, chief economist of the Sumitomo-Life Research Institute. "But it is a recession, Japanese-style." During the last half of the 1990s, Japanese companies based much of their expansion around the world on the wildly inflated values of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Japan's frenzied real estate market. Now both those markets have collapsed. And with long-term interest rates up from 5% to 7%, Japanese companies are less able to sell vast quantities of high-quality goods at razor-thin profit margins. Added to this are pressures from shareholders for a greater return on investments, from Japan's trading partners for restraints on its aggressive trade practices, and from its own citizens for a reduction in their working hours so they can enjoy the fruits of 40 years of relentless toil.

单选题The journal Science is adding an extra round of statistical checks to its peer-review process, editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt announced today. The policy follows similar efforts from other journals, after widespread concern that basic mistakes in data analysis are contributing to the irreproducibility of many published research findings. "Readers must have confidence in the conclusions published in our journal," writes McNutt in an editorial. Working with the American Statistical Association, the journal has appointed seven experts to a statistics board of reviewing editors (SBoRE). Manuscript will be flagged up for additional scrutiny by the journal"s internal editors, or by its existing Board of Reviewing Editors or by outside peer reviewers. The SBoRE panel will then find external statisticians to review these manuscripts. Asked whether any particular papers had impelled the change, McNutt said: "The creation of the " statistics board" was motivated by concerns broadly with the application of statistics and data analysis in scientific research and is part of Science"s overall drive to increase reproducibility in the research we publish." Giovanni Parmigiani, a biostatistician at the Harvard School of Public Health, a member of the SBoRE group, says he expects the board to "play primarily an advisory role." He agreed to join because he "found the foresight behind the establishment of the SBoRE to be novel, unique and likely to have a lasting impact. This impact will not only be through the publications in Science itself, but hopefully through a larger group of publishing places that may want to model their approach after Science." John Ioannidis, a physician who studies research methodology, says that the policy is "a most welcome step forward" and "long overdue." "Most journals are weak in statistical review, and this damages the quality of what they publish. I think that, for the majority of scientific papers nowadays, statistical review is more essential than expert review," he says. But he noted that biomedical journals such as Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet pay strong attention to statistical review. Professional scientists are expected to know how to analyze data, but statistical errors are alarmingly common in published research, according to David Vaux, a cell biologist. Researchers should improve their standards, he wrote in 2012, but journals should also take a tougher line, "engaging reviewers who are statistically literate and editors who can verify the process". Vaux says that Science"s idea to pass some papers to statisticians "has some merit, but a weakness is that it relies on the board of reviewing editors to identify "the papers that need scrutiny" in the first place."

单选题In the two decades between 1910 and 1930, over ten percent of the Black population of the United States left the South, where the majority of the Black population had been located, and migrated to northern states, with the largest number moving, it is claimed, between 1916 and 1918. It has been frequently assumed, but not proved, that most of the migrants in what has come to be called the Great Migration came from rural areas and were motivated by two concurrent factors: the collapse of cotton industry following boll weevil infestation, which began in 1898, and increased demand in the North for labor following the cessation of European immigration caused by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This assumption has led to the conclusion that the migrants' subsequent lack of economic mobility in the North is tied to rural background, a background that implies unfamiliarity with urban living and a lack of industrial skills. But the question of who actually left the South has never been investigated in detail. Although numerous investigations document a flight from rural southern areas to southern cities prior to the Great Migration, no one has considered whether the same migrants then moved on to northern cities. In 1910 over 600,000 Black workers, or ten percent of the Black work force reported themselves to be engaged in "manufacturing and mechanical pursuits", the federal census category roughly including the entire industrial sector. The Great Migration could easily have been made up entirely of this group and their families. It is perhaps surprising to argue that an employed population could be tempted to move, but an explanation lies in the labor conditions then prevalent in the South. About thirty-five percent of the urban Black population in the South was engaged in skilled trades. Some were from the old artisan class of slavery--blacksmiths, masons, carpenters--which had a monopoly of certain trades, but they were gradually being pushed out by competition, mechanization, and obsolescence. The remaining sixty-five percent, more recently urbanized, worked in newly developed industries--tobacco, lumber, coal and iron manufacture, and railroads. Wages in the South, however, were low, and Black workers were aware, through labor recruiters and the Black press, that they could earn more even as unskilled workers in the North than they could as artisans in the South. After the boll weevil infestation, urban Black workers faced competition from the continuing influx of both Black and White rural workers, who were driven to undercut the wages formerly paid for industrial jobs. Thus, a move north would be seen as advantageous to a group that was already urbanized and steadily employed, and the easy conclusion tying their subsequent economic problems in the North to their rural backgrounds comes into question.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} "Making money is a dirty game," says the Institute of Economic Affairs. summing up the attitude of British novelists towards business. The IEA. a free market think-tank, has just published a collection of essays (The Representation of Business in English Literature) by five academics chronicling the hostility of the country's men and women of letters to the sordid business of making money. The implication is that Britain's economic performance Is retarded by an anti-industrial culture. Rather than blaming rebellious workers and incompetent managers for Britain's economic worries. then, we can put George Orwell and Martin Amis in the dock instead. From Dickens's Scrooge to Amis's John Self in his 1980s novel Money, novelists have conjured up a rogue's gallery of mean. greedy, amoral money-men that has alienated their impressionable readers from the noble pursuit of capitalism. The argument has been well made before, most famously in 1981 by Martin Wiener. an American academic, in his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. Lady Thatcher was an admirer of Mr. Wiener's. and she led a crusade to revive the "entrepreneurial culture" which the liberal elite had allegedly trampled underfoot. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, sounds as though he agrees with her. At a recent speech to the Confederation of British Industry, he declared that it should be the duty of every teacher in the country to "communicate the virtues of business and enterprise". Certainly, most novelists are hostile to capitalism, but this refrain risks scapegoating writers for failings for which they are not to blame. Britain's culture is no more anti-business than that of other countries. The Romantic Movement. which started as a reaction against the industrial revolution of the 21st century, was born and flourished in Germany, but has not stopped the Germans from being Europe's most successful entreprcneurs and industrialists. Even the Americans are guilty of blackening business's name. SMERSH and SPECTRE went our with the cold war, James Bond now takes on international media magnates rather than Rosa Kleb. His films such as Erin Brockovich have pitched downtrodden, moral heroes against the evil of faceless corporatism. Yet none of this seems to have dented America's lust for free enterprise. The irony is that the novel flourished as an art form only after, and as a result of. the creation of the new commercial classes of Victorian England, just as the modem Hollywood film can exist only in an era of mass consumerism. Perhaps the moral is that capitalist societies consume literature and film to let off steam rather than to change the world.

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}} A factory that makes uranium fuel for nuclear reactors had a spill so bad it kept the plant closed for seven months last year and became one of only three events in all of 2006 serious enough for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to include in an annual report to Congress. After an investigation, the commission changed the terms of the factory's license and said the public had 20 days to request a hearing on the changes. But no member of the public ever did. In fact, no member of the public could find out about the changes. The document describing them, including the notice of hearing rights for anyone who felt adversely affected, was stamped "official use only," meaning that it was not publicly accessible. The agency would not even have told Congress which factory was involved were it not for the efforts of Gregory B. Jaczko, one of the five commissioners. Mr. Jaczko identified the company, Nuclear Fuel Services of Erwin, Tenn., in a memorandum that became part of the public record. His memorandum said other public documents would allow an informed person to deduce that the factory belonged to Nuclear Fuel Services. Such secrecy by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now coming under attack by influential members of Congress. These lawmakers argue that the agency is withholding numerous documents about nuclear facilities in the name of national security, but that many with-held documents are not sensitive. The lawmakers say the agency must rebalance its penchant for secrecy with the public's right to participate in the licensing process and its right to know about potential hazards. The agency, the congressmen said, "has removed hundreds of innocuous documents relating to the N.F.S. plant from public view." With a resurgence of nuclear plant construction expected after a 30-year hiatus, agency officials say frequently that they are trying to strike a balance between winning public confidence by regulating openly and protecting sensitive information. A commission spokesman, Scott Burnell, said the "official use only" designation was under review. As laid out by the commission's report to Congress and other sources, the event at the Nuclear Fuel Service factory was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid dribbling under a door and into a hallway. Workers had previously described a yellow liquid in a "glove box," a sealed container with gloves built into the sides to allow a technician to manipulate objects inside, but managers had decided it was ordinary uranium. In fact, it was highly enriched uranium that had been declared surplus from the weapons inventory of the Energy Department and sent to the plant to be diluted to a strength appropriate for a civilian reactor. If the material had gone critical, "it is likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute health effects or death," the commission said. Generally, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does describe nuclear incidents and changes in licenses. But in 2004, according to the committee's letter, the Office of Naval Reators, part of the Energy Department, reached an agreement with the commission that any correspondence with Nuclear Fuel Services would be marked "official use only."

单选题Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquerors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned at all. We do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, or manured a field; but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general or a soldier. And I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in battle the greatest number of other countries and ruled over them as conquerors. It is just possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight; so do savages; hence to be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized. Even being good at getting other people to fight for you and telling them how to do it most efficiently—this, after all, is what conquerors and generals have done—is not being civilized. People fight to settle quarrels. Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be able to find some way of settling their disputes other than by seeing which side can kill off the greater number of the other side, and then saying that that side which has killed most has won. And not only has won, but, because it has won, has been in the right. For that is what going to war means; it means saying that might is right. That is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. Even our own age has fought the two greatest wars in history, in which millions of people were killed or mutilated. And while today it is true that people do not fight and kill each other in the streets—while, that is to say, we have got to the stage of keeping the rules and behaving properly to each other in daily life—nations and countries have not learnt to do this yet, and still behave like savages. But we must not expect too much. After all, the race of men has only just started. From the point of view of evolution, human beings are very young children indeed, babies, in fact, of a few months old. Scientists reckon that there has been life of some sort on the earth in the form of jellyfish and that kind of creature for about twelve hundred million years; but there have been men for only one million years, and there have been civilized men for about eight thousand years at the outside. These figures are difficult to grasp; so let us scale them down. Suppose that we reckon the whole past of living creatures on the earth as one hundred years; then the whole past of man works out at about one month, and during that month there have been civilizations for between seven and eight hours. So you see there has been little time to learn in, but there will be oceans of time in which to learn better. Taking man's civilized past at about seven or eight hours, we may estimate his future, that is to say, the whole period between now and when the sun grows too cold to maintain life any longer on the earth, at about one hundred thousand years. Thus mankind is only at the beginning of its civilized life, and as I say, we must not expect too much. The past of man has been on the whole a pretty beastly business, a business of fighting and bullying and gorging and grabbing and hurting. We must not expect even civilized peoples not to have done these things. All we can ask is that they will sometimes have done something else.

单选题Cyberspace, data superhighways, multi media—for those who have seen the future, the linking of computers, television and telephones will change our lives forever. Yet for all the talk of a forthcoming technological utopia, little attention has been given to the implications of these developments for the poor. As with all new high technology, while the West concerns itself with the "how", the question of "for whom" is put aside once again. Economists are only now realizing the full extent to which the communications revolution has affected the world economy. Information technology allows the extension of trade across geographical and industrial boundaries, and transnational corporations take full advantage of it. Terms of trade, exchange and interest rates and money movements are more important than the production of goods. The electronic economy made possible by information technology allows the haves to increase their control on global markets—with destructive impact on the have-nots. For them the result is instability. Developing countries which rely on the production of a small range of goods for export are made to feel like small parts in the international economic machine. As "futures" are traded on computer screens, developing countries simply have less and less control of their destinies. So what are the options for regaining control? One alternative is for developing countries to buy in the latest computers and telecommunications themselves—so-called "development communications" modernization. Yet this leads to long-term dependency and perhaps permanent constraints on developing countries" economies. Communications technology is generally exported from the U.S., Europe or Japan; the patents, skills and ability to manufacture remain in the hands of a few industrialized countries. It is also expensive, and imported products and services must therefore be bought on credit—credit usually provided by the very countries whose companies stand to gain. Furthermore, when new technology is introduced there is often too low a level of expertise to exploit it for native development. This means that while local elites, foreign communities and subsidiaries of transnational corporations may benefit, those whose lives depend on access to the information are denied it.

单选题An important factor of leadership is attraction. This does not mean attractiveness in the ordinary sense, for that is a born quality (1) our control. The leader has, nevertheless, to be a magnet; a central figure towards whom people are (2) . Magnetism in that sense depends, first of all, (3) being seen. There is a type of authority which can be (4) from behind closed doors, but that is not leadership. (5) there is movement and action, the true leader is in the forefront and may seem, indeed, to be everywhere at once. He has to become a legend; the (6) for anecdotes, whether true or (7) ; character. One of the simplest devices is to be absent (8) the occasion when the leader might be (9) to be there, enough in itself to start a rumor about the vital business (10) has detained him. To (11) up for this, he can appeal when least expected, giving rise to another story about the interest he can display (12) things which other folks might (13) as trivial. With this gift for (14) curiosity the leader always combines a reluctance to talk about himself. His interest is (15) in other people; he questions them and encourages them to talk and then remembers all (16) is relevant. He never leaves a party (17) he has mentally field a minimum dossier (档案) on (18) present, ensuring that he knows (19) to say when he meets them again. He is not artificially extrovert but he would usually rather listen (20) talk. Others realize gradually that his importance needs no proof.

单选题According to the passage, troubles on the road are primarily caused by______

单选题One reason that many colleges adopt the website is to______.

单选题Chances are your friends are more popular than you are. It is a basic feature of social networks that has been known about for some time. Consider both an enthusias- tic cocktail party hostess with hundreds of acquaintances and an ill-tempered guy, who may have one or two friends. Statistically speaking, the average person is much more likely to know the hostess simply because she has so many more friends. This, in essence, is what is called the "friendship paradox": the friends of any random individual are likely to be more central to the social web than the individual himself. Now researchers think this seemingly depressing fact can be made to work as an early warning system to detect outbreaks of contagious diseases. By studying the friends of a randomly selected group of individuals, epidemic disease experts can isolate those people who are more connected to one another and are therefore more likely to catch diseases like the flu early. This could allow health authorities to spot outbreaks weeks in advance of current surveillance methods. In a report which has been submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nicholas Christakis from Harvard University and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego put the friendship paradox to good use. In a trial carried out last autumn, they monitored the spread of both seasonal flu and H1N1, popularly known as swine flu, through students and their friends at Harvard University, and found that their social links were indeed causing them to get infected sooner. As this result came with the benefit of hindsight, the researchers tried to come up with a real-time measure that could potentially provide an early warning sign of an outbreak as it began to spread. Currently, the methods used to assess an infection by America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lag an outbreak by a week or two. Google's Flu Trends is at best contemporaneous with an outbreak. Dr. Christakis and Dr. Fowler suggest that a hybrid method might be developed in which the search inquiries of a group of highly connected (ie, pop- ular) individuals could be scanned for signs of the flu. Although the technique has so far only been demonstrated for the flu and in the social surroundings of a university, the researchers nevertheless think that it could help predict other infectious diseases and do so on a larger scale. Nor should it be difficult to implement. Public-health officials already conduct random sampling, so getting the participants to name a few friends too should not be onerous. When it comes to infectious diseases, your friends really do say a lot about you.

单选题The first person who used the word "bold faced" is

单选题What is the relationship of paragraph 4 and 5 to paragraph 3?

单选题We can assert that ______.

单选题The writer wants to tell us that ______.