单选题In his 1979 book, The Sinking Ark, biologist Norman Myers estimated that (1) of more than 100 human-caused extinctions occur each day, and that one million species (2) lost by the century's end. Yet there is little evidence of (3) that number of extinctions. For example, only seven species on the (4) species list have become extinct (5) the list was created in 1973. Bio- (6) is an important value, according to many scientists. Nevertheless, the supposed (7) extinction rates bandied about are achieved by multiplying unknowns by (8) to get imponderables. Many estimates, for instance, rely a great deal on a "species-area (9) ", which predicts that twice as many species will be found on 100 square miles (10) on ten square miles. The problem is that species are not distributed (11) , so which parts of a forest are destroyed may be as important as (12) . (13) , says Ariel Lugo, director of the International Institute of Tropical Forestry- in Puerto Rico, "Biologists who predict high extinction rates (14) the resiliency of nature. " One of the main causes of extinctions is (15) According to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, what destroys (16) trees is not commercial logging, but "poor farmers who have no other (17) for feeding their families than slashing arid bunting a (18) of forest". In countries that practice modern (19) agriculture, forests are in no danger. In 1920, U.S. forests covered 732 million acres. Today they cover 737 million. Forests in Europe (20) from 361 million to 482 million acres between 1950 and 1990.

单选题Who does the author intend to write the passage for?

单选题According to the author, what is the result of the Soviet Union's change in economic policy, in the 1970's?

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} I came across an old country guide the other day. It listed all the tradesmen in each village in my part of the country, and it was impressive to see the great variety of services which were available on one’s own doorstep in the late Victorian countryside. Nowadays a superficial traveler in rural England might conclude that the only village tradesmen still flourishing were either selling frozen food to the inhabitants or selling antiques to visitors. Nevertheless, this would really be a false impression. Admittedly there has been a contraction of village commerce, but its vigor is still remarkable. Our local grocer’s shop, for example, is actually expanding in spite of the competition from supermarkets in the nearest town. Women sensibly prefer to go there and exchange the local news while doing their shopping, instead of queueing up anonymously at a supermarket. And the proprietor knows well that personal service has a substantial cash value. His prices may be a bit higher than those in the town, but he will deliver anything at any time. His assistants think nothing of bicycling down the village street in their lunch, hour to take a piece of cheese to an old-age pensioner who sent her order by word of mouth with a friend who happened to be passing. The more affluent customers telephone their shopping lists and the goods are on their doorsteps within an hour. They have only to hint at a fancy for some commodity outside the usual stock and the grocer a red-faced figure, instantly obtains it for them. The village gains from this sort of enterprise, of course. But I also find it satisfactory because a village shop offers one of the few ways in which a modest individualist can still get along in the world without attaching himself to the big battalions of industry or commerce. Most of the village shopkeepers I know, at any rate, are decidedly individualist in their ways. For exampie, our shoemaker is a formidable figure: a thick-set, irritable man whom children treat with marked respect, knowing that an ill-judged word can provoke an angry eruption at any time. He stares with contempt at the pairs of cheap, mass-produced shoes taken to him for repair: has it come to this, he seems to be saying, that he, a craftsman, should have to waste his skills upon such trash? But we all know he will in fact do excellent work upon them. And he makes beautiful shoes for those who can afford such luxury.

单选题California is having problems with its death penalty. It hasn"t executed anyone since 2000, when a federal court ruled that its method of lethal injection was improper and could cause excessive pain. The state spent five years coming up with a better method — and last month, a judge threw that one out too. One indication of just how encumbered California"s capital-punishment system is: the prisoner who brought the latest lethal-injection challenge has been on death row for 24 years. It isn"t just California. The Death Penalty Information Center reported last month that the number of new death sentences nationally was down sharply in 2011, dropping below 100 for the first time in decades. It also reported that executions were plummeting — down 56% since 1999. There has long been an idea about how the death penalty would end in the U. S. : the Supreme Court would hand down a sweeping ruling saying it is unconstitutional in all cases. But that is not what is happening. Instead of top-down abolition, we seem to be getting it from the bottom up— governors, state legislatures, judges and juries quietly deciding not to support capital punishment. New Jersey abolished its death penalty in 2007. New Mexico abolished its death penalty in 2009. There are now 16 states — or about one-third of the country — that have abolished capital punishment. There are several reasons we seem to be moving toward de facto abolition of the death penalty. A major one has been the growing number of prisoners on death row who have been exonerated — 139 and counting since 1973, according to a list maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center. Even many people who support capital punishment in theory balk when they are confronted with clear evidence that innocent people are being sentenced to death. Another factor is cost. Money is tight these days, and more attention is being paid to just how expensive death-penalty cases are. A 2008 study found that California was spending $137 million on capital cases — a sizable outlay , particularly since it was not putting anyone to death. According to the polls, a majority of the country has not yet turned against the death penalty — but support is slipping. In 1994, 80% of respondents in a GaUup poll said they supported the death penalty for someone convicted of murder. In 2001, just 61% did. In polls where respondents are given a choice between the death penalty or life without parole and restitution , a majority has gone with the non-death option. Many opponents of the death penalty are still hoping for a sweeping Supreme Court ruling, and there is no denying that it would have unique force. Five Justices, with a stroke of their pens, could end capital punishment nationwide. But bottom-up, gradual abolition has other advantages. What we are seeing is not a small group of judges setting policy. It is a large number of Americans gradually losing their enthusiasm for putting people to death.

单选题What dose the last paragraph imply?

单选题Which of the following best defines the word "doctored" (Para. 1, Line 10) ?

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Our visit to the excavation of a Roman fort on a hill near Coventry was of more than archaeological interest. The year’s dig had been a fruitful one and had assembled evidence of a permanent military camp much larger than had at first been conjectured. We were greeted on the site by a group of excavators, some of them filling in a trench that had yielded an almost complete pot the day before, others enjoying the last-day luxury of a cigarette in the sun, but all happy to explain and talk about their work. If we had not already known it, nothing would have suggested that this was a party of prisoners from the nearby prison. This is not the first time that prison labor has been used in work of this kind, but here the experiment, now two years old, has proved outstandingly satisfactory. From the archaeologists’ point of view, prisoners provide a steady force of disciplined labor throughout the entire season, men to whom it is a serious day’s work, and not the rather carefree holiday job that it tends to be for the amateur archaeologist. Newcomers are comparatively few, and can soon be initiated by those already trained in the work. Prisoners may also be more accustomed to heavy work like shoveling and carting soil than the majority of students. When Coventry’s Keeper of Archaeology went to the prison to appeal for help, he was received cautiously by the men, but when the importance of the work was fully understood, far more volunteers were forthcoming than could actually be employed. When they got to work on the site, and their efforts produced pottery and building foundations in what until last year had been an ordinary field, their enthusiasm grew till they would sometimes work through their lunch hour and tea break, and even carry on in the rain rather than sit it out in the hut. This was undoubtedly because the work was not only strenuous but absorbing, and called for considerable intelligence. The men worked always under professional supervision, but as the season went on they needed less guidance and knew when an expert should be summoned. Disciplinary problems were negligible: the men were carefully selected for their good conduct and working on a party like this was too valuable a privilege to be thrown away. The Keeper of Archaeology said that this was by far the most satisfactory form of labor that he had ever had, and that it had produced results, in quantity and quality, that could not have been achieved by any other means.

单选题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 withheld 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 in nocuous 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 Reactors, 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The first sentence of the sixth paragraph implies that______.

单选题The Revenue's last resort in solving the problem seems to be ______.

单选题What does the writer mean by saying "But these were not just the isolated actions of a scientist" ?

单选题It can be inferred that the author’s attitude toward the early stage of British industrialization should be one of

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Is the literary critic like the poet, responding creatively, intuitively, subjectively to the written word as the poet responds to human experience? Or is the critic more like a scientist, following a series of demonstrable, verifiable steps, using an objective method of analysis? For the woman who is a practitioner of feminist literary criticism, the subjectivity versus objectivity, or critic-as-artist-or-scientist, debate has special significance; for her, the question is not only academic, but political as well, and her definition will provoke special risks whichever side of the issue it favors. If she defines feminist criticism as objective and scientific--a valid, verifiable, intellectual method that anyone, whether man or woman, can perform--the definition not only makes the critic-as-artist approach impossible, but may also hinder accomplishment of the utilitarian political objectives of those who seek to change the academic establishment and its thinking, especially about sex roles. If she defines feminist criticism as creative and intuitive, privileged as art, then her work becomes vulnerable to the prejudices of stereotypic ideas about the ways in which women think, and will be dismissed by much of the academic establishment. Because of these prejudices, women who use an intuitive approach in their criticism may find themselves charged with inability to be analytical, to be objective, or to think critically. Whereas men may be free to claim the role of critic-as-artist, women run different professional risks when they choose intuition and private experience as critical method and defense. These questions are political in the sense that the debate over them will inevitably be less an exploration of abstract matters in a spirit of disinterested inquiry than an academic power struggle, in which the careers and professional fortunes of many women scholars only now entering the academic profession in substantial numbers will be at stake, and with them the chances for a distinctive contribution to humanistic understanding, a contribution that might be an important influence against sexism in our society. As long as the academic establishment continues to regard objective analysis as "masculine" and an intuitive approach as "feminine," the theoretician must steer a delicate philosophical course between the two. If she wishes to construct a theory of feminist criticism, she would be well advised to place it within the framework of a general theory of the critical process that is neither purely objective nor purely intuitive. Her theory is then more likely to be compared and contrasted with other theories of criticism with some degree of dispassionate distance. (418 words)

单选题In paragraph 3, the underlined word "exacerbated" is most similar in use to______.