单选题For me, scientific knowledge is divided into mathematical sciences, natural sciences or sciences dealing with the natural world (physical and biological sciences), and sciences dealing with mankind (psychology, sociology, all the sciences of cultural achievements, every kind of historical knowledge). Apart from these sciences is philosophy, about which we will talk later. In the first place, all this is pure or theoretical knowledge, sought only for the purpose of understanding, in order to fulfill the need to understand that is intrinsic and con-substantial to man. What distinguishes man from animals is that he knows and needs to know. If man did not know that the world existed, and that the world was of a certain kind, that he was in the world and that he himself was of a certain kind, he wouldn't be man. The technical aspects or applications of knowledge are equally necessary for man and are of the greatest importance, because they also contribute to defining him as man and permit him to pursue a life increasingly more truly human. But even while enjoying the results of technical progress, man must defend the primacy and autonomy of pure knowledge. Knowledge sought directly for its practical applications will have immediate and foreseeable success, but not the kind of important result whose revolutionary scope is for the most part unforeseen, except by the imagination of the Utopians. Let me recall a well-known example. If the Greek mathematicians had not applied themselves to the investigation of conic section zealously and without the least suspicion that it might someday be useful, it would not have been possible centuries later to navigate far from shore. The first men to study the nature of electricity could not imagine that their experiments, carried on because o mere intellectual curiosity, would eventually lead to modern electrical technology, without which we can scarcely conceive o contemporary life. Pure knowledge is valuable for its own sake, because the human spirit cannot resign itself to ignorance. But, in addition, it is the foundation for practical results that would not have been reached if this knowledge had not been sought disinterestedly.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The dot-com collapse may have been a disaster for Wall Street, but here in Silicon Valley, it was a blessing. It was the welcome end to an abnormal condition that very nearly destroyed the area in an overabundance of success. You see, the secret to the Valley's astounding multiple-decade boom is failure. Failure is what fuels and renews this place. Failure is the foundation for innovation. The valley's business ecology depends on failure the same way the tree-covered hills around us depend on fire--it wipes out the old growth and creates space for new life. The valley has always been in danger of drowning in the unwelcome waste products of success--too many people, too expensive houses, too much traffic, too little office space and too much money chasing too few startups. Failure is the safety valve, the destructive renewing force that frees up people, ideas and capital and recombines them, creating new revolutions. Consider how the Internet revolution came to be. After half a decade of start-up struggles, for example, hundreds of millions of Hollywood dollars were going up in smoke. It all seemed like a terrible waste, but no one noticed that the collapse left one very important byproduct, a community of laid-off C++ programmers who were now expert in multimedia design, and out on the street looking for the next big thing. These media geeks were the pioneer of the dot-com revolution. They were the Web's business pioneers, applying their newfound media sensibilities to create one little company after another. Most of these start-ups failed, but even in failure they advanced the new medium of cyberspace. A few geeks, like Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, succeeded and utterly changed our lives. In 1994 Clark was unemployed after leaving the company be founded, doggedly trying to develop a new interactive-TV concept. He approached Marc Andreessen, the co-developer of Mosaic, the first widely used Internet browser, in hope of persuading Andreessen to help him de-sign his new system. Instead, Andreessen opened Clark's eyes to the Web's potential. Clark promptly tossed his TV plans in the trash, and the two co-founded Netscape, the cornerstone of the consumer-Web revolution. Like the interactive-TV refugees and generations of innovators before them, the dot comers are already hatching new companies. Many are revisiting good ideas executed badly in the' 90s, while others are striking out into entirely new spaces. This happy chaos is certain to mature into a new order likely to upset an establishment, as it delivers life-changing wonders to the rest of us. But this is just the start, for revolutions give birth to revolutions. So let's hope for more of Silicon Valley's successful failures.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} At some point during their education, biology students are told about a conversation in a pub that took place over 50 years ago. J. B. S. Haldane, a British geneticist, was asked whether he would lay down his life for his country. After doing a quick calculation on the back of a napkin, he said he would do so for two brothers or eight cousins. In other words, he would die to protect the equivalent of his genetic contribution to the next generation. The theory of kin selection--the idea that animals can pass on their genes by helping their close relatives--is biology's explanation for seemingly altruistic acts. An individual carrying genes that promote altruism might be expected to die younger than one with "selfish" genes, and thus to have a reduced contribution to the next generation's genetic pool. But if the same individual acts altruistically to protect its relatives, genes for altruistic behavior might nevertheless propagate. Acts of apparent altruism to non-relatives can also be explained away, in what has become a cottage industry within biology. An animal might care for the offspring of another that it is unrelated to because it hopes to obtain the same benefits for itself later on (a phenomenon known as reciprocal altruism). {{U}}The hunter who generously shares his spoils with others{{/U}} may be doing so in order to signal his superior status to females, and ultimately boost his breeding success. These apparently selfless acts are therefore disguised acts of self interest. All of these examples fit economists' arguments that Homo sapiens is also Homo economicus--maximizing something that economists call utility, and biologists fitness. But there is a residuum of human activity that defies such explanations: people contribute to charities for the homeless, return lost wallets, do voluntary work and tip waiters in restaurants to which they do not plan to return. Both economic rationalism and natural selection offer few explanations for such random acts of kindness. Nor can they easily explain the opposite: spiteful behavior, when someone harms his own interest in order to damage that of another. But people are now trying to find answers. When a new phenomenon is recognized by science, a name always helps. In a paper in Human Nature, Dr Fehr and his colleagues argue for a behavioral propensity they call "strong reciprocity". This name is intended to distinguish it from reciprocal altruism. According to Dr Fehr, a person is a strong reciprocator if he is willing to sacrifice resources to be kind to those who are being kind, and to punish those who are being unkind. Significantly, strong reciprocators will behave this way even if doing so provides no prospect of material rewards in the future.

单选题Of all the components of a good night"s sleep, dreams seem to be least within our control. In dreams, a window opens into a world where logic is suspended and dead people speak. A century ago, Freud formulated his revolutionary theory that dreams were the disguised shadows of our unconscious desires and fears; by the late 1970s, neurologists had switched to thinking of them as just "mental noise"—the random byproducts of the neural-repair work that goes on during sleep. Now researchers suspect that dreams are part of the mind"s emotional thermostat, regulating moods while the brain is "off-line." And one leading authority says that these intensely powerful mental events can be not only harnessed but actually brought under conscious control, to help us sleep and feel better, "It"s your dream," says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Chicago"s Medical Center. "If you don"t like it, change it." Evidence from brain imaging supports this view. The brain is as active during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep—when most vivid dreams occur—as it is when fully awake, says Dr. Eric Nofzinger at the University of Pittsburgh. But not all parts of the brain are equally involved; the limbic system (the "emotional brain") is especially active, while the prefrontal cortex (the center of intellect and reasoning) is relatively quiet. "We wake up from dreams happy or depressed, and those feelings can stay with us all day." says Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William Dement. The link between dreams and emotions shows up among the patients in Cartwright"s clinic. Most people seem to have more bad dreams early in the night, progressing toward happier ones before awakening, suggesting that they are working through negative feelings generated during the day. Because our conscious mind is occupied with daily life we don"t always think about the emotional significance of the day"s events—until, it appears, we begin to dream. And this process need not be left to the unconscious. Cartwright believes one can exercise conscious control over recurring bad dreams. As soon as you awaken, identify what is upsetting about the dream. Visualize how you would like it to end instead; the next time it occurs, try to wake up just enough to control its course. With much practice people can learn to, literally, do it in their sleep. At the end of the day, there"s probably little reason to pay attention to our dreams at all unless they keep us from sleeping or "we wake up in a panic," Cartwright says. Terrorism, economic uncertainties and general feelings of insecurity have increased people"s anxiety. Those suffering from persistent nightmares should seek help from a therapist. For the rest of us, the brain has its ways of working through bad feelings. Sleep—or rather dream—on it and you"ll feel better in the morning.

单选题To the people of the Bijagos archipelago, the shark is sacred. In (1) ceremonies young men from these islands (2) the coast of Guinea-Bissau must spear a shark and present the liver to their (3) But can this ancient ceremony (4) the economic fact that a bowl of shark's fin soup can cost $150 in the Far East? In the archipelago, and all along West Africa's coast, sharks are being "finned" to (5) Fishermen can earn $50-80 (6) a kilo of sharks' fins. far more than ordinary fish. By the time they (7) the Far East, they could be (8) $500 a kilo or more. valuable (9) aphrodisiacs as well as for gourmets. The high demand is (10) shark populations in West Africa and elsewhere. Most fish, .vulnerable to (11) eaten by bigger fish, protect their species by laying millions of eggs. But the shark has no natural enemy (12) man. and gives birth to just a (13) of young. (14) female sharks are often caught (15) pregnant, the result has been predictably disastrous. Shark-like sawfish, which are also "finned". are already virtually (16) off the Bijagos islands, and guitarfish are (17) threat. In some parts of West Africa, when sharks and other similar fish have been finned, the rest of the flesh is often (18) , salted and exported to places like Ghana, where there is a (19) for lt. Dried shark is used much (20) a stock cube would be elsewhere. But in the Bijagos islands, where traders are uninterested in exporting dried shark, carcasses are often left to rot on the beach.

单选题THE ivory-billed woodpecker is not large, as birds go: It is about the size of a crow, but flashier, its claim to fame is that, though it had been thought extinct since 1944, a lone kayaker spotted it about two years ago, flying around among the cypress trees in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. And that sighting may prove the death-blow to a $319m irrigation project in the Arkansas corner of the Delta. The Grand Prairie Area Demonstration Project seemed, at first, a fine idea. The Grand Prairie is the fourth-largest rice-bowl in the world, with 363 000 acres under paddies. But it is running out of water, with farmers driving wells deeper and deeper into the underlying aquifer. The new project, dreamed up around a decade ago, would tap excess water from the White river when it floods and pumps it, at the rate of about one billion gallons a day, to storage tanks on around 1000 rice farms. Unfortunately, it would also divert water from the region's huge, swampy wildlife refuges, home to black bears and alligators and the pallid sturgeon. Tiny swamp towns like Clarendon and Brinkley, which are heavily black and almost destitute, rely on nature tourism for the little economic activity they have. In Brinkley, the barber offers an "ivorybill" haircut that makes you look like one. The project has some powerful local backers. They include Blanche Lincoln, the state's senior senator, who grew up on a rice farm in Helena, and Dale Bumpers, a former four-term senator and governor of Arkansas. Mr. Bumpers, long an icon of the environmental movement and prominent in the efforts to establish the refuges, now believes the water project is important for national security in food and trade, and that it will not damage the forests he has worked to protect. Opponents worry that the project, apart from its environmental risks, will overwhelm the innovative water conservation methods that rice-farmers are already using, and give the biggest water users an unfair advantage. They also object that it means using subsidised pumps to provide subsidised water for a crop that doesn't pay. Rice is one of the most heavily assisted crops in America; rice payments cost taxpayers almost $10 billion between 1995 and 2004, and rich farmers round Stuttgart in Arkansas County (an efficient and politically shrewd group) took in $21.2m in subsidies in 2004 alone.

单选题 The Newhouse shelter in Kansas City has helped thousands of abused women and their children over the past 37 years. But last month, the women were forced to move out and the staff started looking for new jobs. The reason was simple. While the need was there, the money was not. {{U}}Dwindling{{/U}} charitable contributions tied to a broad U.S. economic slowdown mean fewer resources and hard choices for charities across the country. "People are holding tight to their money," said Newhouse President Leslie Caplan, who estimated charitable contributions were down ＄200,000 this year compared to last year. That, combined with cuts in government grants, has severely squeezed the center's ＄1.3 million budget. As Americans struggling with rising unemployment and home foreclosures turn to charities for help, charities themselves are running into financial difficulties as donations dwindle. They are being forced to increase their outreach, hold more fund-raising events and seek out new donors to make ends meet. "The people who used to give us small amounts, $10 or $15, that is going away. The people who have a lot of money still are able to give, but they are more selective in their giving," McIntyre said. "It's getting bad out there. " Philanthropic Giving Index, which measures prospects for charitable donations, has dropped to 83 on a scale of 100 from 88 in December 2007, its lowest point since 2003. Rev. Cecil Williams noticed that donations to Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco began falling off earlier this year, forcing him to cut meals, child care, and health care to the poor by up to 15 percent. Meanwhile, the lines for help grow longer. Melissa Perez of La Habra, California, hosted a Brazilian student last year under the auspices of the Center for Cultural Interchange, a Chicago-based nonprofit that arranges for families to house and feed foreign students. "Everything's hard. We're very much pinched," said Perez, who cannot afford to do it again this year because her family's manufacturing business is in trouble. Such experiences mean the Center for Cultural Interchange has not been able to find enough volunteers. "Business is not as good and they feel the pressure and that leads to a decline in giving," said Bridges board member Inayat Malik. "How much people give depends on' how secure they feel," Berman said. "I think we'll see an impact on personal giving this fall and winter, which is when most charitable organizations depend on generosity. "

单选题How many America's celebrity bosses are mentioned in the first paragraph?

单选题It is generally believed that the digital divide is something

单选题The National Association of Securities Dealers is investigating whether some brokerage houses are inappropriately pushing individuals to borrow large sums on their houses to invest in the stock market. Can we persuade the association to investigate would-be privatizers of Social Security? For it is now apparent that the administration"s privatization proposal will amount to the same thing: borrow trillions, put the money in the stock market and hope. Privatization would begin by diverting payroll taxes, which pay for current Social Security benefits, into personal investment accounts. The government would have to borrow to make up the shortfall. This would sharply increase the government"s debt. "Never mind," privatization advocates say, "in the long run, people would make so much on personal accounts that the government could save money by cutting retirees" benefits." Even so, if personal investment accounts were invested in Treasury bonds, this whole process would accomplish precisely nothing. The interest workers would receive on their accounts would exactly match the interest the government would have to pay on its additional debt. To compensate for the initial borrowing, the government would have to cut future benefits so much that workers would gain nothing at all. However, privatizers claim that these investments would make a lot of money and that, in effect, the government, not the workers, would reap most of those gains, because as personal accounts grew, the government could cut benefits. We can argue at length about whether the high stock returns such schemes assume are realistic (they aren"t), but let"s cut to the chase: in essence, such schemes involve having the government borrow heavily and put the money in the stock market. That"s because the government would, in effect, confiscate workers" gains in their personal accounts by cutting those workers" benefits. Once you realize what privatization really means, it doesn"t sound too responsible, does "it? But the details make it considerably worse. First, financial markets would, correctly, treat the reality of huge deficits today as a much more important indicator of the government"s fiscal health than the mere promise that government could save money by cutting benefits in the distant future. After all, a government bond is a legally binding promise to pay, while a benefits formula that supposedly cuts costs 40 years from now is nothing more than a suggestion to future Congresses. If a privatization plan passed in 2005 called for steep benefit cuts in 2045, what are the odds that those cuts would really happen? Second, a system of personal accounts would pay huge brokerage fees. Of course, from Wall Street"s point of view that"s a benefit, not a cost.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Joy William's quirky fourth novel The Quick and the Dead follows three 16-year-old misfits in an abnormal Charlie's Angels set in the American south-west. Driven unclearly to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond curse: they rescue a wounded ox and hurl stones at stuffed elephants. In what is structurally a road novel that ends up where it began, the threesome stumbles upon both cruelty to animals and unlikely romance. A mournful dog is killed by an angry neighbor, a taxidermist falls in love with an 8-year-old direct-action firebrand determined that he pays. for his sins. A careen across the barely tamed Arizona prairie, this peculiar book aims less for a traditional storyline than a sequence of noisy (often hilarious) conversations, ridiculous circumstances, and absurdist scene. The consequent long-walk-to-nowhere is both the book's limitation and its charm. All three girls are motherless. Fiercely political Alice discovers that her parents are her grandparents, who thereupon shrivel: "Lie had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into oldness." Both parents of the sorrowful Corvus drowned while driving on a flooded interstate off-ramp. The mother of the more conventional Annabel ("one of those people who would say, We'll get in touch soonest' when they never wanted to see you again") slammed her car drunkenly into a fish restaurant. Later, Annabel's father observes to his wife's ghost. "You didn't want to order what I ordered, darling." The sharp-tongued ghost snaps back: "That's because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake." Against a roundly apocalyptic world view. the great pleasures of this book are line-by-line. Ms. Williams can break setting and character alike in a few slashes: "it was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but courageous downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave." Alice's acerbity spits little wisdoms: putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is "a classic capitalistic consumer trick, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror' and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy." Whether or not the novel, like Alice. expressly advocates animal rights, an animal motif crops up in every scene, as flesh-and-blood "critters" (usually dead) or plain decoration on crockery. If Ms. Williams does not intend to induce human horror at a pending cruel Armageddon, she at least invokes a future of earthly loneliness, where animals appear only as ceramic-hen butter dishes and extinct-species Elastoplasts. One caution: when flimsy narrative superstructure begins to sag, anarchic wackiness can grow wearing. While The Quick and the Dead is sharp from its first page, the trouble with starting at the edge is there is nowhere to go. Nevertheless. Ms. Williams is original, energetic and viscously funny: Carl Hiaasen with a conscience.

单选题The word "lopsided" (Paragraph 4) most probably means ______.

单选题Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and. Strange things have been happening to England. Still{{U}} (1) {{/U}}from the dissolution of the empire in the years{{U}} (2) {{/U}}World War Ⅱ, now the English find they are not even British. As the cherished "United Kingdom" breaks into its{{U}} (3) {{/U}}parts, Scots are clearly{{U}} (4) {{/U}}and the Welsh, Welsh. But who exactly are the English? What's left of them, with everything but the {{U}}(5) {{/U}}half of their island taken away? Going back in time to{{U}} (6) {{/U}}roots doesn't help. First came the Celts, then the Romans, then Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes. Invasion after invasion, until the Norman Conquest. English national identity only seemed to find its{{U}} (7) {{/U}}later, on the shifting sands of expansionism, from Elizabethan times onwards. The empire seemed to seal it. But now there's just England, {{U}}(8) {{/U}}of a green island in the northern seas, lashed by rain, scarred by two{{U}} (9) {{/U}}of vicious industrialization fallen{{U}} (10) {{/U}}dereliction, ruined, as D．H. Lawrence thought, by "the tragedy of ugliness," its abominable architecture. Of all English institutions, the one to{{U}} (11) {{/U}}on would surely be the pub. Shelter to Chaucer's pilgrims, home to Falstaff and Hal, throne of felicity to Dr. Johnson, the pub- that smoky, yeasty den of jollity-is the womb of{{U}} (12) {{/U}}, if anywhere is. Yet in the midst of this national{{U}} (13) {{/U}}crisis, the pub, the mainstay of English life, a staff driven{{U}} (14) {{/U}}into the sump of history, {{U}}(15) {{/U}}as the Saxons, is suddenly dying and evolving at{{U}} (16) {{/U}}rates. Closing at something like a rate of more than three a day, pubs have become{{U}} (17) {{/U}}enough that for the first time since the Domesday Book, more than half the villages in England no longer have one. It's a rare pub that still{{U}} (18) {{/U}}, or even limps on, by being what it was {{U}}(19) {{/U}}to be: a drinking establishment. The old{{U}} (20) {{/U}}of a pub as a place for a "session," a lengthy, restful, increasingly tipsy evening of swigging, is all but defunct.

单选题Like the flu, a person's emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you'll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you'll tend to wall slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else's irrational thought processes. Anyone who's lost money on a house in need of repair may have succumbed to a classic economic fallacy known as "sunk costs." You make a bad investment in a home that's never going to sell for more than you put in to it, yet you want to justify your investment by continuing to throw money into renovations. One way to avoid this hole is to get advice from someone who has no self-interest in the project. But is the outsider still somehow susceptible to your mindset? To find out, social psychologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University and colleagues asked college students to take over decision-making for a person they had never met--and who they didn't know was fake. The volunteers were split into two groups: one that felt some connection with the decision-maker and another that didn't. In one experiment, the volunteers watched the following scenario play out via text on a computer screen: the fake decision-maker tried to outbid another person for a prize of 356 points, which equaled $4.45 in real money. The decision-maker started out with 360 points, and every time the other bidder raised the stakes by 40 points, the decision-maker followed suit. Volunteers were told that once the decision-maker bid over 356 points, he or she would begin to lose some of the $12 payment for participating in the study. When the decision-maker neared this threshold, the volunteers were asked to take over bidding. Objectively, the volunteers should have realized that--like the person who makes a bad investment in a house--the decisionmaker would keep throwing good money after bad. But the volunteers who felt identification with the fake player made almost 60% more bids and were more likely to lose money than those who didn't feel a connection. Galinsky believes that the results suggest that companies trying to reverse results of bad decisions should find true outsiders. He points to troubled automaker Ford as an example. Instead of hiring from within--as General Motors (GM) recently did--Ford made Alan Mulally from Boeing, an aerospace company, their chief execu- tive officer. Many experts believe that Ford is now recovering quicker than GM. "It's true that insiders have more knowledge," Galinsky says. "But when you are already down the road of a failed course of action, you really need.., a true outsider./

单选题What is one of the authors attitude towards industrialism?______

单选题It is suggested toward the end of the text that