单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Information technologists have dreamt for decades of making an electronic display that is as good as paper: cheap enough to be pasted on to wails and billboards, clear enough to be read in broad daylight, and thin and flexible enough to be bound as hundreds of flippable leaves to make a book. Over the past few years they have got close. In particular, they have worked out how to produce the display itself, by sandwiching tiny spheres that change colour in response to an electric charge inside thin sheets of flexible, transparent plastic. What they have not yet found is a way to mass-produce flexible electronic circuitry with which to create that charge. But a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that this, too, may be done soon. The process described by John Rogers and his colleagues from Bell Laboratories, an arm of Lucent Technologies, in New Jersey, and E Ink Corporation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starts with E Ink's established half-way house towards true electronic paper. This is based on spheres containing black, liquid dye and particles of white, solid pigment. The pigment particles are negatively charged, so they can be pushed and pulled around by electrodes located above and below the sheet. The electrodes, in turn, are controlled by transistors under the sheet. Each transistor manipulates a single picture element (pixel), making it black or white. The pattern of pixels, in turn, makes up the picture or text on the page. The problem lies in making the transistors and connections. Established ways of doing this, such as photolithography, use silicon as the semiconductor in the transistors. That is all right for applications suck as pesters. It is too fragile and too expensive, though, for genuine electronic paper—which is why cheap and flexible electronic components are needed. For flexibility, Dr Rogers and his colleagues chose pentacene as their semiconductor, and gold as their wiring. Pentacene is a polymer whose semiconducting properties were discovered only recently. Gold is the most malleable metal known, and one of the best electrical conductors. Although it is pricey, so little is needed that the cost per article is tiny. To make their electronic paper the researchers started with a thin sheet of Mylar, a tough plastic, that was coated with indium-tin oxide (ITO), a transparent electrical conductor. To carve this conductor into a suitable electric circuit, they used an innovation called microcontact printing lithography. This trick involves printing the pattern of the circuit on to the ITO using a rubber stamp. The "ink" in the process is a solvent-resistant chemical that protects this part of the ITO while allowing the rest to be dissolved.

单选题The phrase "function in the disservice of one another" ( Line 7, Par

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} It's not only humans that flourish in large settlements. Some ants find urban life so accommodating that their populations explode and they form supercolonies in cities. "One of the most common house ant species might have been built for living in some of the smallest spaces in a forest, but the ants have found ways to take advantage of the comforts of city living," Purdue University said in a statement. Grzegorz Buczkowski, a Purdue University research assistant professor of entomology, discovered odorous house ants live in supercolonies, creating complex networks entomologists have never seen with the species before now. He found that odorous house ant colonies become larger and more complex as they move from forest to city and act somewhat like an invasive species, the university said. "The ants live about 50 to a colony with one queen in forest settings but explode into supercolonies with more than 6 million workers and 50 000 queens in urban areas," the university explained. "This is a native species that's doing this," said Buczkowski, whose results are published in the early online version of the journal Biological Invasions. "Native ants are not supposed to become invasive. We don't know of any other native ants that are outcompeting other species of native ants like these," Buczkowski said. Odorous house ants live in hollow acorn shells in the forest. They're called odorous because they have a coconut (椰子)-or rum-like smell when crushed. They're considered one of the most common house ants, Purdue said. In semi-natural areas that are a cross of forest and urban areas, such as a park, Buczkowski said he observed colonies of about 500 workers with a single queen. "It's possible that as the ants get closer to urban areas they have easier access to food, shelter and other resources," he said. "In the forest, they have to compete for food and nesting sites," Buczkowski said. "In the cities, they don't have that competition. People give them a place to nest, food to eat. " Buczkowski observed the ants in three different settings on and around the Purdue campus. He said it might be expected that if the odorous house ants were able to multiply into complex colonies, other ants would do the same. But Buczkowski found no evidence that other ants had adapted to new environments and evolved into larger groups as the odorous house ants have, Purdie said. "It's possible that odorous house ants are better adapted to city environments than other ant species or that they had somehow outcompeted or dominated other species," he said. "This raises a lot of questions we'd like to answer. " Buczkowski said understanding why the supercolonies form could lead to better control of the pests in homes, as well as ensuring that they don't outcompete beneficial species. Future studies on odorous house ants will include studying the ant's genetics and trying to understand the effects of urbanization of odorous house ants, Purdue said.

单选题The professionals, according to the text, have made a mistake in

单选题Picture-taking is a technique both for reflecting the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer's temperament, discovering itself through the camera's cropping of reality. That is, photography has two directly opposite ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of fearlessness, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all. These conflicting ideals arise from uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture. Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as observer is attracting because it implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed. An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography's means. Whatever are the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression just like painting, its originality is closely linked to the power of a machine. The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton's high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke. But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limit imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident. For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing". Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast. This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past when images had a handmade quality. This longing for some primitive state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers. Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness. (451 words)Notes: crop vt.播种，修剪(树木),收割。count for little 无关紧要。predatory 掠夺成性的。champion n.冠军; vt.支持。benevolent 好心肠的，行善的。ambivalence 矛盾心理。make (+不定式)似乎要：He makes to begin. (他似乎要开始了。) swirls and eddies 漩涡。cult 狂热崇拜。daguerreotype 银板照相法。

单选题Few beyond California' s technology crowd recognise the name Larry Sonsini; none within its circle could fail to. For four decades he has been lawyer, adviser and friend to many prominent companies and investors. Some consider him the most powerful person in Silicon Valley. Companies beg for his law firm to represent them. The 65-year-old chairman of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and more recently, as outside counsel to Hewlett-Packard (HP), for initially defending the board's dubious investigative practices. WSG&R boasts 600 lawyers and represents around half of Silicon Valley's public companies, including Apple? Sun Microsystems and Google. Last year it ranked first in private-equity and venture-capital deals, with nearly twice as many as its closest rival. Over the past five years WSG&R has worked on over 1 000 mergers and acquisitions, collectively worth over $ 260 billion. The recent troubles cast a shadow over WSG&R's reputation. Although Mr. Sonsini is not accused of wrongdoing himself, many of his firm's clients are on the ropes. Former executives at Brocade Communications suffered criminal charges in July, Mr. Sonsini Served on Brocade's board until last year and his firm was its outside counsel. He also was on the boards of Pixar, Echelon, Lattice Semiconductor, LSI Logic and Novell all firms at which the issuing of stock options is being called into question. WSG&R dismisses the idea that Mr. Sonsini faced a conflict of interest by acting as both director and legal adviser to so many firms and says he did not advise HP in its investigation of board members. Mr. Sonsini initially said it was "well done and within legal limits". It now seems it was neither.

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. There are many features that {{U}}(1) {{/U}} a movie as American, but perhaps the most {{U}}(2) {{/U}} is the theme of the loner-hero (孤胆英雄). In the western movie, which comes out of many {{U}}(3) {{/U}} of the American West, a typical figure is the lonesome cowboy. He wanders into a town and {{U}}(4) {{/U}} out its troubles. Then the strong and independent hero rides off into the sunset {{U}}(5) {{/U}}. Americans like this {{U}}(6) {{/U}} in their films because they are {{U}}(7) {{/U}} independent, and individualism {{U}}(8) {{/U}} a great deal with them. An individual, who is able to {{U}}(9) {{/U}} the evils of the world, or of a small town, is someone to admire. Even the gangster movie, a very popular {{U}}(10) {{/U}} of the typical American film, usually has a hero. {{U}}(11) {{/U}} he is a lawman out to catch the criminals or a gangster who suddenly sees the light and tries to go {{U}}(12) {{/U}} During the violence-ridden period of Prohibition in the 1920s, the gangster movie {{U}}(13) {{/U}} in popularity. These films kept the same. {{U}}(14) {{/U}} as the western--the bad cannot triumph. One good person can save the innocent. Recent science fiction films deal {{U}}(15) {{/U}} the same theme. Against the forces of the alien powers, people will fight to protect their ideals. Here, too, the action {{U}}(16) {{/U}} around a single individual, {{U}}(17) {{/U}} now he or she must save the world. The hero battles the unknown, trusting in inner capabilities and in the power of good {{U}}(18) {{/U}} evil. Fearless, the hero of a typical American movie does not {{U}}(19) {{/U}} to jump into the action. This dominant theme of the American movie is familiar {{U}}(20) {{/U}} people around the world.

单选题People, like most animals, are naturally lazy. So the ascent of mankind is something of a mystery. Humans who make their livings hunting and gathering in the traditional way do not have to put much effort into it. Farmers who rely on rain to water their crops work significantly harder, and lead unhealthier lives. But the real back-breaking is that carried out by farmers who use irrigation. Yet it was the invention of irrigation, at first sight so harmful to its practitioners that actually produced a sufficient surplus to feed the priests, scholars, artists and so on whose activities are collectively thought of as "civilization". In the past 10,000 years, the world's climate has become temporarily colder and drier on several occasions. The first of these, known as the Younger Dryas, after a tundra-loving plant that thrived during it, occurred at the same time as the beginning of agriculture in northern Mesopotamia. It is widely believed that this was not a coincidence. The drying and cooling of the Younger Dryas adversely affected the food supply of hunter-gatherers. That would have created an incentive for agriculture to spread once some bright spark invented it. Why farmers then moved on to irrigation is, however, far from clear. But Harvey Weiss, of Yale University, thinks he knows. Dr. Weiss observes that the development of irrigation coincides with a second cool, dry period, some 8,200 years ago. His analysis of rainfall patterns in the area suggests that rainfall in agriculture's upper-Mesopotamian heartland would, at this time, have fallen below the level needed to sustain farming reliably. Farmers would thus have been forced out of the area in search of other opportunities. Once again, an innovative spark was required. But it clearly occurred to some of these displaced farmers that the slow-moving waters of the lower Tigris and Euphrates, near sea level, could be diverted using canals and used to water crops. And the rest, as the cliche has it, is history. So climate change helped to intensify agriculture, and thus start civilization. But an equally intriguing idea is that the spread of agriculture caused climate change. In this case, the presumed criminal is forest clearance. Most of the land cultivated by early farmers in the Middle East would have been forested. When the trees that grew there were cleared, the carbon they contained ended up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Moreover, one form of farming—the cultivation of rice in waterlogged fields—generates methane, in large quantities. William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia, explained that, in combination, these two phenomena had warmed the atmosphere prior to the start of the industrial era. As environmentalists are wont to observe, mankind is part of nature. These studies show just how intimate the relationship is.

单选题The day was star-crossed: Friday the 13th in the month of October, on the eve of the second looming anniversary of a devastating market crash. "I'm telling you, psychology is really funny. People get crazy in situations like that," said portfolio strategist Elaine Garzarelli. Last week Friday the 13th lived up to its frightful reputation. After drifting lower at a sleepy pace for most of the day, the Dow Jones industrial average abruptly lurched into a hair-raising sky dive in the final hour of trading. The Bush Administration moved swiftly to avert any sense of crisis after the market closed. Declared Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady: "It's important to recognize that today's stock market decline doesn't signal any fundamental change in the condition of the economy. The economy remains well balanced, and the outlook is for continued moderate growth." But Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey, who chairs a House subcommittee on telecommunications and finance, vowed to hold hearings this week on the stock market slide. Said he: "This is the second heart attack. My hope is that before we have the inevitable third heart attack, we pay attention to these problems." Experts found no shortage of culprits to blame for the latest shipwreck. A series of downbeat realizations converged on Friday, ranging from signs of a new burst of inflation to sagging corporate profits to troubles in the junk-bond market that has fueled major takeovers. The singular event that shook investors was the faltering of a $6.75 billion labor management buyout of UAL, the parent company of United Airlines, the second largest U. S. carrier. On one point most thoughtful Wall Streeters agreed: the market had reached such dizzying heights that a correction of some sort seemed almost inevitable. Propelled by favorable economic news and a wave of multibillion-dollar takeovers, stocks had soared more than 1,000 points since the 1987 crash. But by last August some Wall streeters were clearly worried. The heaviest blow to the market came Friday afternoon. In a three-paragraph statement, UAL said a labor-management group headed by Chairman Stephen Wolf had failed to get enough financing to acquire United. Several banks had apparently balked at the deal, which was to be partly financed through junk bonds. The take-over group said it would submit a revised bid "in the near term,' but the announcement stunned investors who had come to view the United deal as the latest sure thing in the 1980s buyout binge. Said John Downey, a trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange: "The airline stocks have looked like attractive takeover targets. But with the United deal in trouble, everyone started to wonder what other deals might not go through./

单选题We assumed ethics needed the seal of certainty, else it was non-rational. And certainty was to be produced by a deductive model: the correct actions were derivable from classical first principles or a hierarchical ranked pantheon of principles. This model, though, is bankrupt. I suggest we think of ethics as analogous to language usage. There are no univocal rules of grammar and style which uniquely determine the best sentence for a particular situation. Nor is language usage universalizable. Although a sentence or phrase is warranted in one case, it does not mean it is automatically appropriate in like circumstances. Nonetheless, language usage is not subjective. This should not surprise us in the least. All intellectual pursuits are relativistic in just these senses. Political science, psychology, chemistry, and physics are not certain, but they are not subjective either. As I see it, ethical inquiry proceed like this: we are taught moral principles by parents, teachers, and society at large. As we grow older we become exposed to competing views. These may lead us to reevaluate presently held beliefs. Or we may find ourselves inexplicably making certain valuations, possibly because of inherited altruistic tendencies. We may "learn the hard way, that some actions generate unacceptable consequences. Or we may reflect upon our own and others' "theories" or patterns of behavior and decide they are inconsistent. The resulting views are "tested;" we act as we think we should and evaluate the consequences of those actions on ourselves and on others. We thereby correct our mistakes in light of the test of time. Of course people make different moral judgments; of course we cannot resolve these differences by using some algorithm which is itself beyond judgment. We have no vantage point outside human experience where we can judge right and wrong, good and bad. But then we don't have a vantage point from where we can be philosophical relativists either. We are left within the real world, trying to cope with ourselves, with each other, with the world, and with our own mistakes. We do not have all the moral answers; nor do we have an algorithm to discern those answers. Neither do we possess an algorithm for determining correct language usage but that does not make us throw up our hands in despair because we can no longer communicate. If we understand ethics in this way, we can see, I think, the real value of ethical theory. Some people talk as if ethical theories give us moral prescriptions. They think we should apply ethical principles as we would a poultice: after diagnosing the illness, we apply the appropriate dressing. But that is a mistake. No theory provides a set of abstract solutions to apply straightforwardly. Ethical theories are important not because they solve all moral dilemmas but because they help us notice salient features of moral problems and help us understand those problems in context.

单选题Eating better and more adventurously is becoming an obsession, especially among people with money to spend. Healthier eating-and not-so-healthy eating-as well as the number and variety of food choices and venues continue to increase at an ever quickening pace. Globalization is the master trend that will drive the world of food in the years ahead. Consumers traveling the globe, both virtually and in reality, will be able to sweep up ingredients, packaged foods, recipes, and cooking techniques from every comer of the earth at an ever-intensifying and accelerating pace. Formerly remote ingredients and cooking styles are creating a whole new culinary mosaic as they are transplanted and reinterpreted all over the world. Many factors are behind this, but none more so than the influence of the great international hotel chains. Virtually every chef who has worked for Hilton, Westin, Peninsula, or any other major chain gathers global experience in locales as diverse as Singapore, New Orleans, Toronto, and Dubai. At each stop, they carry away cooking ideas and techniques they can and do use elsewhere. This trend will gain even greater momentum as ambitious young adults stake their own futures on internationalization, treating broader food away as an important aspect of their own advancement. Young people will need knowledge of food and ingredients from different continents and cultures as one aspect of socialization, enculturation, cultural exchange, and success. In country after country, there seems little doubt that global cuisine will make its biggest inroads among the younger set. Many in the generations now coming of age will treat world-ranging food knowledge and experience as key elements in furthering their personal plans, business acumen, and individual growth. The Internet has made global contacts a matter of routine. Computer networking will permit chefs and others in the food industry, including consumers, to link directly with the best available authorities in faraway nations, supplementing or bypassing secondhand sources of information altogether. Time, with all its implications, will also be a factor in emerging world food trends. More and more of us are destined to operate on global time-that is, at full tilt 24 hours a day. This will become the norm for companies with resources scattered all over the planet. Beyond the 24-hour supermarkets many of us already take for granted, there will also be three-shift shopping centers open at any hour. Restaurants in the great business capitals intent on cultivating an international clientele will serve midnight breakfasts or break-of-dawn dinners (with the appropriate wines) without raising a single eyebrow.