单选题With only about 1,000 pandas left in the world, China is desperately trying to clone the animal and save the endangered species. That's a move similar to what a Texas A＆M University researcher has been undertaking for the past five years in a project called "Noah's Ark". Dr. Duane Kraemer, a professor in Texas A＆M's College of Veterinary Medicine and a pioneer in embryo transfer work and related procedures, says he salutes the Chinese effort and "I wish them all the best success possible. It's a worthwhile project, certainly not an easy one, and it's very much like what we're attempting here at Texas A＆M—to save animals from extinction. " Noah's Ark is aimed at collecting eggs, embryos, semen and DNA of endangered animals and storing them in liquid nitrogen. If certain species should become extinct, Kraemer says there would be enough of the basic building blocks to reintroduce the species in the future. It is estimated that as many as 2,000 species of mammals, birds and reptiles will become extinct over the next 100 years. The panda, native only to China, is in danger of becoming extinct in the next 25 years. This week, Chinese scientists said they grew an embryo by introducing cells from a dead female panda into the egg cells of a Japanese white rabbit. They are now trying to implant the embryo into a host animal. The entire procedure could take from three to five years to complete. "The nuclear transfer of one species to another is not easy, and the lack of available panda eggs could be a major problem," Kraemer believes. "They will probably have to do several hundred transfers to result in one pregnancy. It takes a long time and it's difficult, but this could be groundbreaking science if it works. They are certainly not putting any live pandas at risk, so it is worth the effort , "adds Kraemer, who is one of the leaders of the Missyplicity Project at Texas A＆M, the first-ever attempt at cloning a dog. "They are trying to do something that's never been done, and this is very similar to our work in Noah's Ark. We're both trying to save animals that face extinction. I certainly applaud their effort and there's a lot we can learn from what they are attempting to do. It's a research that is very much needed. /

单选题"The message" Dr. Farid's work focuses on is close to ______.

单选题If you smoke, you'd better hurry. From July 1st pubs all over England will, by law, be no-smoking areas. So will restaurants, offices and even company cars, if more than one per-son uses them. England's smokers are following a well-trodden path. The other three bits of the United Kingdom have already banned smoking in almost all enclosed public spaces, and there are anti-smoking laws of varying strictness over most of Western Europe. The smoker' s journey from glamour through toleration to suspicion is finally reaching its end in pariah status. But behind this public-health success story lies a darker tale. Poorer people are much more likely to smoke than richer ones—a change from the 1950s, when professionals and la-borers were equally keen. Today only 15% of men in the highest professional classes smoke, but 42% of unskilled workers do. Despite punitive taxation—20 cigarettes cost around ￡ 5.00 ($10.00), three-quarters of which is tax—55% of single mothers on benefits smoke. The figure for homeless men is even higher; for hard-drug users it is practically 100% . The message that smoking kills has been heard, it seems, but not by all. Having defeated the big killers of the past—want, exposure, poor sanitation—governments all over the developed world are turning their attention to diseases that stem mostly from how individuals choose to live their lives. But the same deafness afflicts the same people when they are strongly encouraged to give up other sorts of unhealthy behavior. The lower down they are on practically any pecking order—job prestige, income, education, background-the more likely people are to be fat and unfit, and to drink too much. That tempts governments to shout ever louder in an attempt to get the public to listen and nowhere do they do so more aggressively than in Britain. One reason is that pecking orders matter more than in most other rich countries: income distribution is very unequal and the unemployed, disaffected, ill-educated rump is comparatively large. Another reason is the frustration of a government addicted to targets, which often aim not only to improve some-thing but to lessen inequality in the process. A third is that the National Health Service is free to patients, and paying for those who have arguably brought their ill-health on themselves grows alarmingly costly. Britain' s aggressiveness, however, may be pointless, even counter-productive. There is no reason to believe that those who ignore measured voices will listen to shouting. It irritates the majority who are already behaving responsibly, and it may also undermine all government pronouncements on health by convincing people that they have an ultra-cautious margin of error built in. Such hectoring may also be missing the root cause of the problem. According to Mr. Marmot, who cites research on groups as diverse as baboons in captivity, British civil servants and Oscar nominees, the higher rates of ill health among those in more modest walks of life can be attributed to what he calls the "status syndrome". People in privileged positions think they are worth the effort of behaving healthily, and find the will-power to do so. The implication is that it is easier to improve a person's health by weakening the connection between social position and health than by targeting behavior directly. Some public-health experts speak of social cohesion, support for families and better education for all. These are bigger undertakings than a bossy campaign; but more effective, and quieter.

单选题Why do some philosophers hold the view that animals cannot have rights?

单选题What is the attitude of consumers towards' luxury goods in the present situation?

单选题 In this year's State of the Union address, President Obama outlined a plan to gradually raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9/hour. Raising the minimum wage has always been contentious, but necessary. Yet this is a political fight we shouldn't have to have. The poor—mostly women and minorities-make too little. And the more radical aspect of Obama's plan could fix that for good. The president has proposed indexing minimum wage, meaning that it would increase each year as the cost of living slowly climbs, free from the whims of partisan fighting. Our federal minimum wage began in 1938, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which also limited the work-week to 44 hours, provided guaranteed overtime and placed limits on child labor. The minimum wage was set at 25 cents an hour (about $4.10 today). Its purpose was simple: guarantee that Americans who went to work received a wage they could live on. And the hope was that higher wages for workers would mean more consumer spending, thus strengthening the U.S. economy. Since its enactment, the benefits of a minimum wage have been well established. It is important to consider how much people earning the minimum wage actually make. At present, a minimum wage earner working 40 hours a week without ever taking a vacation will make $15,080 a year. Obama's proposed increase would mean an additional $3,640. Most minimum wage workers are adults, not teens, and most work for large corporations, not mom-and-pop stores. This means there are hard-working parents who are employed full-time at places that make billions in profits and often receive considerable tax breaks. And yet these parents still don't earn enough to live above the poverty line. How have we gotten to a place where people can work tirelessly and still not make ends meet? In large part it's the result of political ambivalence to the conditions of poverty and the wages of our lowest paid workers. As the minimum wage has remained flat, productivity has increased, and so too have corporate profits. While the economic arguments for raising the minimum wage are important, we should also not forget to think about the morality of our economy. We all derive not just wages from our labors, but purpose, meaning and a sense that we are part of something greater than ourselves: by supporting our family, helping our co-workers, and participating in the shared enterprise of community. Yes, the minimum wage should be higher. But it's not just because it's good for the economy and will help raise the wages of even non-minimum wageworkers. It's because there is a value to work that is deeper than money.

单选题Good looks ,the video-games industry is discovering ,will get you only so far. The graphics on a modern game may far outstrip the pixellated blobs of the 1980s, but there is more to a good game than eye candy. Photo-realistic graphics make the lack of authenticity of other aspects of gameplay more apparent. It is not enough for game characters to look better—their behaviour must also be more sophisticated, say researchers working at the interface between gaming and artificial intelligence(AI). Today' s games may look better, but the gameplay is " basically the same" as it was a few years ago, says Michael Mateas, the founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. AI, he suggests, offers an" untapped frontier" of new possibilities. "We are topping out on the graphics, so what's going to be the next thing that improves game-play?" asks John Laird, director of the AI lab at the University of Michigan. Improved AI is a big part of the answer, he says. Those in the industry agree. The high-definition graphics possible on next-generation games consoles, such as Microsoft' s Xbox 360, are raising expectations across the board, says Neil Young of Electronic Arts, the world' s biggest games publisher. "You have to have high-resolution models, which requires high-resolution animation," he says," so now I expect high-resolution behaviour." Representatives from industry and academia will converge in Marina del Rey, California, later this month for the second annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment(AIIDE) conference. The aim, says Dr Laird, who will chair the event, is to increase the traffic of people and ideas between the two spheres. "Games have been very important to AI through the years," he notes. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computing in the 1940s, wrote a simple chess-playing program before there were any computers to run it on; he also proposed the Turing test, a question-and-answer game that is a yardstick for machine intelligence. Even so, AI research and video games existed in separate worlds until recently. The AI techniques used in games were very simplistic from an academic perspective, says Dr. Mateas, while AI researchers were, in turn, clueless about modern games. But, he says, " both sides are learning, and are now much closer." Consider, for example, the software that controls an enemy in a first-person shooter (FPS)—a game in which the player views the world along the barrel of a gun. The behaviour of enemies used to be pre-scripted: wait until the player is nearby, pop up from behind a box, fire weapon, and then roll and hide behind another box, for example. But some games now use far more advanced" planning systems" imported from academia. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behaviour, the AI monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles, "says Dr. Mateas. They can, for example, work out whether the player can see them or not, seek out cover when injured, and so on. "Rather than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can dynamically shift, depending on what' s happening," says Fiona Sperry of Electronic Arts. If the industry is borrowing ideas from academia, the opposite is also true. Commercial games such as" Unreal Tournament", which can be easily modified or scripted, are being adopted as research tools in universities, says Dr. Laird. Such tools provide flexible environments for experiments, and also mean that students end up with transferable skills. But the greatest potential lies in combining research with game development, argues Dr. Mateas. "Only by wrestling with real content are the technical problems revealed, and only by wrestling with technology does it give you insight into what new kinds of content are possible, "he says.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C, and D on ANSWER SHEET 1. Just how does a person arrive at an idea of the kind of person that he is? He develops this{{U}} (1) {{/U}}of self through a gradual and complicated{{U}} (2) {{/U}}which continues throughout life. The notion is an{{U}} (3) {{/U}}that one establishes only with the help of others.{{U}} (4) {{/U}}the elementary knowledge that one is short or tall is a comparative judgment that we cannot make{{U}} (5) {{/U}}we have the opportunity to{{U}} (6) {{/U}}ourselves with others. One's idea of qualities which are harder to{{U}} (7) {{/U}}is even more dependent upon other people's ideas. Whether one is intelligent, or stupid; attractive, or ugly; these and many other ideas of the self are{{U}} (8) {{/U}}from the reactions of people with whom we{{U}} (9) {{/U}}This process of{{U}} (10) {{/U}}the nature of the self from the reaction of others has been labeled the "Looking-glass Self" by Cooley, who carefully analyzed this psychological{{U}} (11) {{/U}}of self-discovery. Just as the picture in the mirror gives an image of the physical self,{{U}} (12) {{/U}}the perception of the reactions of others gives an image of the social self. We know,{{U}} (13) {{/U}}, that we are good at certain things and not at others. This{{U}} (14) {{/U}}came to us from the reactions of other persons, first our parents and then other individuals{{U}} (15) {{/U}}in life. It should be remembered that, as other people's reactions could be{{U}} (16) {{/U}}and understood in more than one way, the looking-glass self with which the individual{{U}} (17) {{/U}}may easily differ from the image others have actually formed of his{{U}} (18) {{/U}}Clearly, it is our perception of the responses of others and not their{{U}} (19) {{/U}}responses that{{U}} (20) {{/U}}our self-image, and these perceptions are often not accurate.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A. B. C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. Millions of dollars often depend on the choice of which commercial to use in launching a new product. So you show the commercials to a{{U}} (1) {{/U}}of typical consumers and ask their opinion. The answers you get can sometimes lead you into a big{{U}} (2) {{/U}}. Respondents may lie just to be polite. Now some companies and major advertising{{U}} (3) {{/U}}have been hiring voice detectives who test your normal voice and then record you on tape{{U}} (4) {{/U}}commenting on a product. A computer analyzes the degree and direction of change{{U}} (5) {{/U}}normal. One kind of divergence of pitch means the subject{{U}} (6) {{/U}}Another kind means he was really enthusiastic. In a testing of two commercials{{U}} (7) {{/U}}children, they were. vocally, about equally{{U}} (8) {{/U}}of both. but the computer reported their emotional{{U}} (9) {{/U}}in the two was totally different. Most major commercials are sent for testing to theaters{{U}} (10) {{/U}}with various electronic measuring devices. People regarded as{{U}} (11) {{/U}}are brought in off the street. Viewers can push buttons to{{U}} (12) {{/U}}whether they are interested or bored. Newspaper and magazine groups became intensely interested in testing their ads for a product{{U}} (13) {{/U}}TV ads for the same product. They were interested because the main{{U}} (14) {{/U}} of evidence shows that people{{U}} (15) {{/U}}a lot more mental activity when they read{{U}} (16) {{/U}}when they sit in front of the TV set. TV began to be{{U}} (17) {{/U}}"a low-involvement"{{U}} (18) {{/U}}. It is contended that low involvement means that there is less{{U}} (19) {{/U}}that the ad message will be {{U}}(20) {{/U}}. {{B}}Notes:{{/B}} commercial 广告。pitch 音调。

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Come on, my fellow white folks, we have something to confess. Out with it, friends, the biggest secret known to whites since the invention of powdered rouge: welfare is a white program. The numbers go like this: 61% of the population receiving welfare, listed as "means-tested cash assistance" by the Census Bureau, is identified as white, while only 33% is identified as black. These numbers notwithstanding, the Republican version of "political correctness" has given us "welfare cheat" as a new term for African American since the early days of Ronald Reagan. Our confession surely stands: white folks have been gobbling up the welfare budget while blaming someone else. But it's worse than that. If we look at Social Security, which is another form of welfare, although it is often mistaken for an individual insurance program, then whites are the ones who are crowding the trough. We receive almost twice as much per capita, for an aggregate advantage to our race of $10 billion a year--much more than the $3. 9 billion advantage African American gain from their disproportionate share of welfare. One sad reason: whites live an average of six years longer than African Americans, meaning that young black workers help subsidize a huge and growing "over-class" of white retirees. I do not see our confession bringing much relief. There's a reason for resentment, though it has more to do with class than with race. White people are poor too, and in numbers far exceeding any of our more generously pigmented social groups. And poverty as defined by the government is a vast underestimation of the economic terror that persists at incomes--such as $ 20,000 or even $ 40,000 and above--that we like to think of as middle class. The problem is not that welfare is too generous to blacks but that social welfare in general is too stingy to all concerned. Naturally, whites in the swelling "near poor" category resent the notion of whole races supposedly frolicking at their expense. Whites, near poor and middle class, need help too--as do the many African Americans. So we white folks have a choice. We can keep pretending that welfare is black program and a scheme for transferring our earnings to the pockets of shiftless, dark-skinned people. Or we can clear our throats, blush prettily and admit that we are hurting too--for cash assistance when we're down and out, for health insurance, for college aid and all the rest. {{U}}Racial scapegoating{{/U}} has its charms, I will admit: the surge of righteous anger, even the fun--for those inclined--of wearing sheets and burning crosses. But there are better, nobler sources of white pride, it seems to me. Remember this: only we can truly, deeply blush.

单选题Fast-food eaters may not absolutely be obese mainly because

单选题The author raises the issue of ethical consideration in cloning in paragraph 1 in order to

单选题The best information para. 5 gives the reader is that ______.