单选题According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. According to Alexa, the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 5th. Quantcast ranks the website 15th in U.S. in terms of traffic, and Compete. com ranks it 14th in U.S. The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances. But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months. And now, Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as "they" or "themself." "We've gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles," Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit said in a company statement. In English, when users fail to specify what gender they are, Facebook defaults to some form of the gender neutral, plural pronoun "they." That option is unavailable when the plural is always masculine or feminine in other languages. "People who haven't selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex," Gleit wrote. Unless the gender of the user is clear, Facebook does not know which pronoun to use to notify other members add information to the site. This common English problem is multiplied in languages where masculine and feminine distinctions are grammatically ingrained. The site will now ask users to specify whether they are male or female on their basic member- ship profile. It will prompt existing users to define themselves. Facebook has an opt-out option for members who choose not to specify their gender or do not consider gender to be clear cut. Members can remove mention of gender from messages about their activities. "We've received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting," Gleit said.

单选题 {{U}}It's the part of the job that stock analyst Hiroshi Naya dislikes the most: phoning investor managers on a Saturday or Sunday when he's working on a report and facing a deadline.{{/U}} In Japan, placing a work call to someone on the weekend "feels like entering someone's house with your shoes on, " says Naya, chief analyst at Ichiyoshi Research Institute in Tokyo. So last year, Naya started asking his questions via messages on Facebook. While a telephone call seems intrusive, he says, a Facebook message "feels more relaxed. " Many Japanese have become fans of Mark Zuckerberg's company in the past year. It's taken a while: Even as Facebook took off in India, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia, it's been a laggard in Japan since its local-language version debuted in 2008. {{U}}The site faced cultural obstacles in a country where people historically haven't been comfortable sharing personal information, or even their names, on the Internet.{{/U}} Homegrown rivals such as community website operator Mixi and online game portals such as DeNA allow their users to adopt pseudonyms. The Japanese are overcoming their shyness, though. In February, Facebook had 13.5 million unique users, up from 6 million a year earlier. That puts Facebook in the No. 1 position in Japan for the first time, ahead of Twitter and onetime leader Mixi. "Facebook didn't have a lot of traction in Japan for the longest time, " says Arvind Rajan, Asia-Pacific managing director for Linkedln, which entered the Japanese market last October and hopes to emulate Face book's recent success. " They really did turn the corner, " he says. Rajan attributes the change in attitude to the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. During the crisis and its aftermath, sites such as Facebook helped parents and children locate each other and allowed people post and find reliable information. " The real-name case has been answered, " says Rajan. "People are getting it now. " Japanese see Facebook as a powerful business tool. The real-name policy makes the site a good place to cultivate relationships with would-be partners. As more companies such as retailers Uniqlo and Muji turn to Facebook to reach Japanese consumers, the Silicon Valley company is benefiting from a viruous cycle, says Koki Shiraishi, an analyst in Tokyo with Daiwa Securities Capital Markets. "{{U}}It's a chicken-and-egg thing{{/U}}: If everyone starts using it, then more people start using it. " As a result of Facebook's rise, investors have soured on some of its rivals : DeNA's stock price has dropped 24 percent in the past year, and Mixi's has fallen 38 percent. Growth at Twitter—which also entered Japan in 2008—has stagnated, and the San Francisco company has partnered with Mixi to do joint marketing. Twitter Japan country manager James Kondo says there's no reason to worry. Japan's social networking scene "is a developing thing, " he says. "We're not in a flat market where everyone is competing for a share of a fixed pie. "

单选题Like every dog, every disease now seems to have its day. World Tuberculosis (infections disease in which growths appear on the lungs) Day is on Saturday March 24th. Tuberculosis was once terribly fashionable. Dying of "consumption" seems to have been a favorite activity of garret-dwelling 19th-century artists, h has, however, been neglected of late. Researchers in the field never tire of pointing out that TB kills a lot of people. According to figures released earlier this week by the World Health Organization, 1.6 million people died of the disease in 2005, compared with about 3m for AIDS and l m for malaria. But it receives only a fraction of the research budget devoted to AIDS. America's National Institutes of Health, for example, spends 20 times as much on AIDS as on TB. Nevertheless, everyone seems to getting in on the TB-day act this year. The Global Fund an international organization responsible fur fighting all three diseases but best known for its work on AIDS, has used the occasion to trumpet its tuberculosis projects. The fund claims that its anti-TB activities since it opened for business in 2002 have saved the lives of over 1m people. The World Health Organization has issued a report that contains some good news. Although the number of TB cases is still rising, the rate of illness seems to have stabilized; the caseload, in other words, is growing only because the population itself is going up. Even drug companies are involved. In the nm-up to the day itself, Eli Lilly announced a $ 50m boost to its MDRTB Global Partnership. MDR stands for multi-drug resistance, and it is one of the reasons why TB is back in the limelight. Careless treatment has caused drug-resistant strains to evolve all over the world. The course of drugs needed to clear the disease completely takes six mouths, anti persuading people lo stay that course once their symptoms have gone is hard. Unfortunately, those infected with MDR have to be treated with less effective, more poisonous and more costly drugs. Naturally, these provoke still more. non-compliance and thus still more evolution. The other reason TB is back is its relationship to AIDS. The (global Fund's joint responsibility for the diseases is no coincidence. AIDS does not kill directly. Rather, HIV, the virus that causes it, weakens the body's immune system and exposes the sufferer to secondary infections. Of these, TB is one of the most serious. It kills 200 000 AIDS patients a year. However, some anti-TB drugs interfere with the effect of some anti-HIV drugs. Conversely, in about 20% of cases where a patient has both diseases, anti-HIV drugs make the tuberculosis worse. The upshot is that 125 years after human beings worked out what caused TB, it is still a serious threat.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The moon appears to warp the minds of some men. Despite putting men on the moon in 1969 America seems determined on re-enacting the space race, this time pitting its efforts against those of the Chinese. Now a Russian company claims it could develop a system to exploit the moon's natural resources and potentially relocate harmful industries there. This is {{U}}lunacy{{/U}}. Russia certainly has great prowess in space. In its former guise as the centre of power in the Soviet Union it launched the first man-made satellite in 1957. In a spectacular follow up, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in 1961. Another triumph came in 1968 when the Russians sent a spaceship to orbit the moon with turtles aboard, returning it and its living cargo safely to Earth. An unmanned Russian spacecraft also landed on the moon ahead of the first manned landing by the Americans. Even after Neil Armstrong took his one small step, Russia has proved its superiority in keeping people in space stations orbiting the Earth. The Russian Soyuz rocket is a mainstay of satellite launches and would be used to rescue astronauts should any accident befall the International Space Station. Head of the spacecraft manufacturer that helped achieve these Russian successes, this week boasted that his rockets could be used to industrialise the moon. So why were his remarks greeted with such scepticism? One reason for the cynicism is that the idea is absurd. A United Nations treaty passed in 1967 bans potentially harmful interference with the Earth's original satellite and requires international consultation before proceeding with any activity that could disrupt the peaceful exploration of space, including the moon. A second problem is that landing on the moon has proved beyond the budget of any state other than America and of any private company to date. In fact one of the best hopes for investment comes from space tourism. On Saturday April 7th, the fifth such holidaymaker entered space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Charles Simonyi, an American software developer, paid $25m for his ten-day stay at the International Space Station. The next holiday destination is the moon. The tour operator that organised the first five packages is offering two tickets to orbit the moon for $100m each. Launch would be aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. But the Soyuz system was designed in the 1960s and has been on the verge of retirement for many years. Unfortunately the Russian authorities have postponed indefinitely the development of a successor. Thus the claim of the industrialisation of the moon is unlikely to succeed.

单选题The authors main purpose in writing this article is______

单选题Which of the following is NOT considered a result of the "Space Race"?

单选题 As college seniors hurtle into the job hunt, little lies on the resume-for example, claiming a degree when they're three credits shy of graduation-seem harmless enough. So new grads ought to read this memo now: those 20-year-old falsehoods on cream-colored, 32-1b. premium paper have ruined so many highprofile executives that you wonder who in the business world hasn't got the message. A resume listing two fabricated degrees led to the resignation of David Edmondson, CEO of RadioShack, in February. Untruthful resume have also hindered the careers of executives at the U.S. Olympic Committee. The headlines haven't dented job seekers' desire to dissemble even as employers have grown increasingly able to detect deception. InfoLink Screening Services, a background-checking company, estimates that 14% of job applicants in the U.S. lie about their education on their resumes. Employees who lie to get in the door can cause untold damage on a business, experts say, from staining the reputation and credibility of a firm to upending co-workers and projects to igniting shareholder wrath-and that's if the lie is found out. Even when it isn't, the falsified resume can indicate a deeply rooted inclination toward unethical behavior. "There's a lot of evidence that those who cheat on job applications also cheat in school and in life," says Richard Grfffith, director of the industrial and organizational psychology program at the Florida Institute of Technology. "If someone says they have a degree and they don't, I'd have little faith that person would tell the truth when it came to financial statements and so on." Employers' fears have sparked a boom in the background-screening industry. But guarding the henhouse does little good if the fox is already nestled inside. To unmask the deceivers among them, some employers are conducting checks upon promotion. Verified Person markets its ability to provide ongoing employee screening through automated criminal checks. With this increased alertness comes a thorny new dilemma: figuring out whether every lie is really a fireable offense. Many bosses feel that a worker's track record on the job speaks more strongly than a stretched resume, says John Challenger of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Rather than booting talented workers, Challenger suggests, employers should offer a pardon period. "A moratorium would let anyone who needs to come clean," he says And the culprit could always go back to school and finish that degree-maybe even on company time.

单选题With a series of well-timed deals, private-equity firms are giving traditional media- managers cause to be envious. The Warner Music transaction, in which Edgar Bronfman junior and three private-equity firms paid Time Warner $ 2.6 billion for the unit in 2003, is already judged a financial triumph for the buyers. Their success is likely to draw still more private-equity into the industry. And the investments are likely to get bigger: individual private-equity funds are growing--a $10 billion fund is likely this year--so even the biggest media firms could come within range, especially if private-equity investors club together. Some private-equity firms have long put money in media assets, but mostly reliable, relatively obscure businesses with stable cash flows. Now, some of them are placing big strategic bets on the more volatile bits, such as music and movies. And they are currently far more confident than the media old guard that the advertising cycle is about to turn sharply upwards. One reason why private-equity is making its presence felt in media is that it has a lot of money to invest. Other industries are feeling its weight too. But private-equity's buying spree (狂购乱买) reveals a lot about the media business in particular. Media conglomerates( 联合公司) lack the confidence to make big acquisitions, after the last wave of deals went wrong. Executives at Time Warner, for instance, which disastrously merged with AOL in 2000, wanted to buy MGM, a movie studio, but the board (it is said) were too nervous. Instead, private- equity firms combined with Sony, a consumer-electronics giant, to buy MGM late last year. Private-equity's interest also reflects the fact that revenue growth in media businesses such as broadcast TV and radio is now hard to come by. The average annual growth rate for 12 categories of established American media businesses in 1998-2003, excluding the internet, was just 3.4% , says Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment bank. Private-equity puts a higher value on low-growth, high cashflow assets than the public stockmarket, says Jonathan Nelson, founder of Providence Equity Partners, a media-focused private-equity firm. What private-equity men now bring to the media business, they like to think, is financial discipline plus an enthusiastic attitude towards new technology. Old-style media managers, claim the newcomers, are still in denial about how technology is transforming their industry. Traditional media managers grudgingly agree that, so far, private-equity investors are doing very nicely indeed from their entertainment deals. The buyers of Warner Music have already got back most of their $ 2.6 billion from the firm by cutting costs, issuing debt and making special payouts to shareholders. This year, its investors are expected to launch an initial public offering, which could bring them hundreds of millions more.

单选题With the spread of inter-active electronic media a man alone in his own home will never have been so well placed to fill the inexplicable mental space between cradle and crematorium. So I suspect that books will be pushed more and more into those moments of travel or difficult defecation (1) people still don't quite know what to do with. When people do read, I think they'll want to feel they are reading literature, or (2) something serious. (3) you're going to find fewer books presenting themselves as no-nonsense and (4) assuming literary pretensions and being packaged as works of art. We can expect an extraordinary variety of genre, but with an underlying (5) of sentiment and vision. Translators can only (6) from this desire for the presumably sophisticated. We can look forward to lots of difficult names and fantastic stories of foreign parts enthusiastically (7) by the overall worship of the "global village'. Much of this will be awful and some wonderful, (8) don't expect the press or the organizers of prizes to offer you much help in making the appropriate distinctions. They will be chiefly (9) in creating celebrity, the greatest enemy of discrimination, but a good prop for the (10) consumer. Every ethnic grouping over the world will have to be seen to have a great writer—a phenomenon that will (11) a new kind of provincialism, more chronological than geographic, (12) only the strictly contemporary is talked about and (13) Universities, including Cambridge, will include (14) their literature syllabus novels, written only last year. (15) occasional exhumation for the Nobel, the achievements of ten or only five years ago will be largely forgotten. In short, you can't go too far wrong when predicting more of the same. But there is a (16) side to this—the inevitable reaction against it. The practical things I would like to see happen--publishers seeking less to (17) celebrity through extravagant advertising, (18) and magazines (19) space to reflective pieces—are rather more improbable than the Second Coming(耶稣复临). But dullness never quite darkens the whole planet. In their own idiosyncratic fashion a few writers will (20) be looking for new departures.

单选题According to the passage, one cause for the difficulties of American higher education is that_____

单选题Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb.12, 1809. How"s this for a coincidence? Instinctively, we want to say that they belong together. It"s not just because they were both great men, and not because they happen to be exactly at the same age. Rather, it"s because the scientist and the politician each touched off a revolution that changed the world. Lincoln and Darwin were both revolutionaries, in the sense that both men upended realities that prevailed when they were born. They seem—and sound—modern to us, because the world they left behind them is more or less the one we still live in. So, considering the joint magnitude of their contributions—and the coincidence of their conjoined birthdays—it is hard not to wonder: who was the greater man? It"s an apples and oranges—or Superman vs. Santa—comparison. But if you limit the question to influence, it bears pondering, all the more if you turn the question around and ask, what might have happened if one of these men had not been born? Very quickly the balance tips in Lincoln"s favor. Great as Darwin"s book on evolution is, it does no harm to remember that be hurried to publish "The Origin of Species" because he thought he was about to be scooped(抢先)by his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently come up with much the same idea of evolution through natural selection. In other words, there was a certain inevitability to Darwin"s theory. Ideas about evolution surfaced throughout the first part of the 19th century, and while none of them was as conclusive as Darwin"s, it was not as though he was the only man who had the idea. Lincoln, in contrast, is Unique. Take him out of the picture, and there is no telling what might have happened to the country. True, his election to the presidency did provoke secession and, in turn, the war itself, but that war seems inevitable—not a question of if but when. If Darwin were not so irreplaceable as Lincoln, that should not deny his accomplishment. No one could have formulated his theory any more elegantly—or anguished more over its implications. Like Lincoln, Darwin was brave. He risked his health and his reputation to advance the idea that we are not over nature but a part of it. Lincoln prosecuted a war—and became its ultimate casualty—to ensure that no man should have dominion over another. Their identical birthdays afford us a superb opportunity to observe these men in the shared context of their time—how each was shaped by his circumstances, how each reacted to the beliefs that steered the world into which he was born and ultimately how each reshaped his comer of that world and left it irrevocably changed.

单选题It seems that_____ is the musical instrument used throughout the history of blues.