单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The idea of humanoid robots is not new, of course. They have been part of the imaginative landscape ever since Karl Capek, a Czech writer, first dreamed them up for his 1921 play "Rossum's Universal Robots" . (The word "robot" comes from the Czech word for drudgery, robota.) Since then, Hollywood has produced countless variations on the theme, from the sultry False Maria in Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece "Metropolis" to the wittering C-3PO in "Star Wars" and the ruthless assassin of "Terminator" . Humanoid robots have walked into our collective subconscious, colouring our views of the future. But now Japan's industrial giants are spending billions of yen to make such robots a reality. Their new humanoids represent impressive feats of engineering: when Honda introduced Asimo, a four-foot robot that had been in development for some 15 years, it walked so fluidly that its white, articulated exterior seemed to conceal a human. Honda continues to make the machine faster, friendlier and more agile. Last October, when Asimo was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh, it walked on to the stage and accepted its own plaque. At two and a half feet tall, Sony's QRIO is smaller and more toy-like than Asimo. It walks, understands a small number of voice commands, and can navigate on its own. If it falls over, it gets up and resumes where it left off. It can even connect wirelessly to the Internet and broadcast what its camera eyes can see. In 2003, Sony demonstrated an upgraded QRIO that could run. Honda responded last December with a version of Asimo that runs at twice the speed. In 2004, Toyota joined the fray with its own family of robots, called Partner, one of which is a four-foot humanoid that plays the trumpet. Its fingers work the instrument's valves, and it has mechanical lungs and artificial lips. Toyota hopes to offer a commercial version of the robot by 2010. This month, 50 Partner robots will act as guides at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. Despite their sudden proliferation, however, humanoids are still a mechanical minority. Most of the world's robots are faceless, footless and mute. They are bolted to the floors of factories, stamping out car parts or welding pieces of metal, machines making more machines. According to the United Nations, business orders for industrial robots jumped 18% in the first half of 2004. They may soon be outnumbered by domestic robots, such as self-navigating vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and window washers, which are selling fast. But neither industrial nor domestic robots are humanoid.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} "Target apologizes for any discomfort," said a spokesman for the discount chain. "that may have been caused by the baseball caps and shorts carrying the insignia '88' ." He explained that it was not the company's intent to promote hate. Since when does 88 mean "hate"? It turns out that some neoNazis have discovered that the eighth letter of the alphabet is "h", and to them the number 88 is an oh-so- secret ceded symbol for "heil Hitler" . The Boston Herald recalled the days of dot-and-dash telegraphy, with its two-digit codes for common phrases, and observed that "on CB and ham radio, and at the bottom of an odd e-mail, you still run across '88'—'love and kisses', which no gallant will dare use anymore to pique the interest of the YLs ( young ladies) for fear they'll think he is a bug-eyed, swastika--tattooed nutcake" Fans of Chet Gould's "Dick Tracy" strip of the 1950's will remember a piano-playing cartoon character with the musical name "88 Keys", played by Mandy Patinkin in the 1990 movie version. It comes from the number of keys on a piano keyboard, and its symbol can be the opposite of hatred: "Some of those 88 keys are white, and some black," notes Larry Horn of Yale University, "all playing together in peaceful harmony-and each set pretty boring on its own. Makes you wonder." This latest superstition imposed on a number, and its panicky effect on merchants, is nothing new. It's a variant of 311, throe references to the 11th letter, k, for the Ku Klux Klan. (Manufacturers who may have inadvertently turned out baseball caps with that number on it will now turn white as a sheet.) Before that, 666 was a hot number for the nervous. In the New Testament's Revelation 13: 9-18, the Apostle John recalls a vision of a boast that was an opponent of Christ: "Count the number of the beast," goes the King James Version, "for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six." Extrapolating this into a name is an example of gematria, an ancient numbers game that assigns each letter of the alphabet a numerical value. Some scholars point out that the verse characterizes, but does not name, the beast-which aren't Satan. Numbers are not letters. Hate groups and concerned cabals do not own the numbers, which can be used to stand for anything. So wear 88 all you like, and if you have nightmares about 666, as soda jerks used to say I'm 86 on the mail.

单选题William Shakespeare described old age as "second childishness" — sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste. In the case of taste he may, musically speaking, have been even more perceptive than he realized. A paper in Neurology by Giovanni Frisoni and his colleagues at the National Centre for Research and Care of Alzheimer's Disease in Brescia, Italy, shows that one form of senile dementia can affect musical desires in ways that suggest a regression, if not to infancy, then at least to a patient's teens. Frontotemporal dementia is caused, as its name suggests, by damage to the front and sides of the brain. These regions are concerned with speech, and with such "higher" functions as abstract thinking and judgment. Frontotemporal damage therefore produces different symptoms from the loss of memory associated with Alzheimer's disease, a more familiar dementia that affects the hippocampus and amygdala in the middle of the brain. Frontotemporal dementia is also rarer than Alzheimer's. In the past five years the centre in Brescia has treated some 1,500 Alzheimer's patients; it has seen only 46 with frontotemporal dementia. Two of those patients interested Dr. Frisoni. One was a 68-year-old lawyer, the other a 73-year-old housewife. Both had undamaged memories, but displayed the sorts of defect associated with frontotemporal dementia—a diagnosis that was confirmed by brain scanning. About two years after he was first diagnosed, the lawyer, once a classical music lover who referred to pop music as "mere noise", started listening to the Italian pop band "883". As his command of language and his emotional attachments to friends and family deteriorated, he continued to listen to the band at full volume for many hours a day. The housewife had not even had the lawyer's love of classical music, having never enjoyed music of any sort in the past. But about a year after her diagnosis she became very interested in the songs that her 11-year-old granddaughter was listening to. This kind of change in musical taste was not seen in any of the Alzheimer's patients, and thus appears to be specific to those with frontotemporal dementia. And other studies have remarked on how frontotemporal dememia patients sometimes gain new talents. Five sufferers who developed artistic abilities are known. And in another lapse of musical taste, one woman with the disease suddenly started composing and singing country and western songs. Dr. Frisoni speculates that the illness is causing people to develop a new attitude towards novel experiences. Previous studies of novelty-seeking behavior suggest that it is managed by the brain's right frontal lobe. A predominance of the right over the left frontal lobe, caused by damage to the latter, might thus lead to a quest for new experience. Alternatively, the damage may have affected some specific neural circuit that is needed to appreciate certain kinds of music. Whether that is a gain or a loss is a different matter. As Dr. Frisoni puts it in his article, De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est. Or, in plainer words, there is no accounting for taste.

单选题Should anyone much care whether an American boy living overseas gets six vicious thwacks on his backside? So much has been argued, rejoined and rehashed about the case of Michael Fay, an 18-year-old convicted of vandalism and sentenced to a caning in Singapore, that an otherwise sorry little episode has shaded into a certified International Incident, complete with intercessions by the U. S. head of state. An affair has outraged American libertarians even as it has animated a general debate about morality East and West and the proper functioning of U.S. law and order. Which, to all appearances, is what Singapore wanted. The question of whether anyone should care about Michael Fay is idle. though Singapore officials profess shock at the attention his case had drawn, they know Americans care deeply about the many sides of this issue. Does a teenager convicted of spraying cars with easily removable paint deserve half a dozen powerful strokes? At what point does swift, sure punishment become torture? By what moral authority can America, with its high rates of lawlessness and license, preach of a safe society about human rights? The caning sentence has concentrated minds wondrously on an already lively domestic debate over what constitutes a due balance between individual and majority rights. Too bad Michael Fay has become a focus for this discussion. Not only does he seem destined to be pummeled and immobilized, but the use of Singapore as a standard for judging any other society, let alone the cacophonous U. S. , is fairly worthless. To begin with, Singapore is an offshore republic that tightly limits immigration. Imagine crime-ridden Los Angeles, to which Singapore is sometimes contrasted, with hardly any inflow of the hard-luck, often desperate fortune seekers who flock to big cities. Even without its government's disciplinary measures, Singapore more than plausibly would be much the same as it is now. An academic commonplace today is that the major factor determining social peace and prosperity is culture--a sense of common identity, tradition and values. Unlike Singapore, though, the U. S. today is a nation in search of a common culture, trying to be a universal society that assimilates the traditions of people from all over the world. Efforts to safeguard minority as well as individual rights have produced a gridlock in the justice system. Its troubles stem more from the decay of family life than from any government failures. Few societies can afford to look on complacently. As travel eases and cultures intermix, the American experience is becoming the world's. The circumstances of this affair--evidently no Singaporean has ever been punished under the Vandalism Act for defacing private property--suggest that Singapore has used Fay as an unwilling point man in a growing quarrel between East and West about human rights.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Here is a quick way to spoil a Brussels dinner party. Simply suggest that world governance is slipping away from the G20, G7, G8 or other bodies in which Europeans may hog up to half the seats. Then propose, with gloomy relish, that the future belongs to the G2: newly fashionable jargon for a putative body formed by China and America. The fear of irrelevance haunts Euro-types, for all their public boasting about Europe’s future might. The thought that the European Union might not greatly interest China is especially painful. After all, the 21st century was meant to be different. Indeed, to earlier leaders like France’s Jacques Chirac, a rising China was welcome as another challenge to American hegemony, ushering in a “multipolar world” in which the EU would play a big role. If that meant kow-towing to Chinese demands to shun Taiwan, snub the Dalai Lama or tone down criticism of human-rights abuses, so be it. Most EU countries focused on commercial diplomacy with China, to ensure that their leaders’ visits could end with flashing cameras and the signing of juicy contracts. Meanwhile, Europe’s trade deficit with China hit nearly∈170 billion ( $ 250 billion) last year. In five years, China wants 60% of car parts in new Chinese vehicles to be locally made. This is alarming news for Germany, the leading European exporter to China thanks to car parts, machine tools and other widgets. As ever, Europeans disagree over how to respond. Some are willing to challenge China politically — for example, Germany, Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands. But they are mostly free traders. That makes them hostile when other countries call for protection against alleged Chinese cheating. In contrast, a block of mostly southern and central Europeans, dubbed “accommodating mercantilists” by the ECFR (The European Council on Foreign Relations), are quick to call for anti-dumping measures: But that makes them anxious to keep broader relations sweet by bowing to China on political issues. The result is that European politicians often find themselves defending unconditional engagement with China. The usual claim is that this will slowly transform the country into a freer, more responsible stakeholder in the world. The secret, it is murmured, is to let Europe weave China into an entangling web of agreements and sectoral dialogues. In 2007 no fewer than 450 European delegations visited China. Big countries like France and Britain add their own bilateral dialogues, not trusting the EU to protect their interests or do the job properly. There are now six parallel EU and national “dialogues” with China on climate change, for example.

单选题Back in the .16th century, political plays were all about men. Not now. For some time, American female playwrights have followed the (1) of Wendy Wasserstein, a 50-year-old Brooklyn-born dramatist, whose work has focused (2) family drama and personal (3) . Overtly political plays were considered (4) and unfashionable. But this is no longer so often the (5) . A new generation of female playwrights (6) tackling such subjects (7) racism, rape and apartheid. The quality of these plays has varied (8) . The best (9) their subjects with nuance and subtlety, while it is the more controversial pr6ductions (10) fall flat. With topical issues now the stuff 0fshallow, made-for-television movies, audiences are looking to the theatre for something more (11) . Rebecca Gilman's previous play, "Spinning into Butter", dealt with white racism in academia; her current drama, "Boy Gets Girl", gives a feminist take on male searching and objeetificati6n of women. Kia Corthron has three plays, including "Force Continuum", (12) with racial issues (13) or coming to the New York stage this year. But perhaps the most (14) recent play on political themes to (15) is "The Syringa Tree", a one-woman show about segregation in South Africa in the 1960s, written and (16) by Pamela Glen. (17) the play had trouble (18) an audience when it (19) in September last year, critical acclaim and persistent word-of-mouth followed, gradually (20) to make "The Syringa Tree" one of the city's most popular offerings.

单选题In the early 1960s Wilt Chamberlain was one of only three players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) listed at over seven feet. If he had played last season, however, he would have been one of 42. The bodies playing major professional sports have changed dramatically over the years, and managers have been more than willing to adjust team uniforms to fit the growing numbers of bigger, longer frames. The trend in sports, though, may be obscuring an unrecognized reality: Americans have generally stopped growing. Though typically about two inches taller now than 140 years ago, today"s people—especially those born to families who have lived in the U.S. for many generations—apparently reached their limit in the early 1960s. And they aren"t likely to get any taller. "In the general population today, at this genetic, environmental level, we"ve pretty much gone as far as we can go," says anthropologist William Cameron Chumlea of Wright State University. In the case of NBA players, their increase in height appears to result from the increasingly common practice of recruiting players from all over the world. Growth, which rarely continues beyond the age of 20, demands calories and nutrients—notably, protein—to feed expanding tissues. At the start of the 20th century, under-nutrition and childhood infections got in the way. But as diet and health improved, children and adolescents have, on average, increased in height by about an inch and a half every 20 years, a pattern known as the secular trend in height. Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, average height—5"9" for men, 5"4" for women—hasn"t really changed since 1960. Genetically speaking, there are advantages to avoiding substantial height. During childbirth, larger babies have more difficulty passing through the birth canal. Moreover, even though humans have been upright for millions of years, our feet and back continue to struggle with bipedal posture and cannot easily withstand repeated strain imposed by oversize limbs. "There are some real constraints that are set by the genetic architecture of the individual organism," says anthropologist William Leonard of Northwestern University. Genetic maximums can change, but don"t expect this to happen soon. Claire C. Gordon, senior anthropologist at the Army Research Center in Natick, Mass, ensures that 90 percent of the uniforms and workstations fit recruits without alteration. She says that, unlike those for basketball, the length of military uniforms has not changed for some time. And if you need to predict human height in the near future to design a piece of equipment, Gordon says that by and large, "you could use today"s data and feel fairly confident."

单选题The "reconfiguration plan'(Par

单选题Which of the following can best conclude the main idea of the passage?

单选题European leaders primarily fear that

单选题The apprenticeship can bring Gemma Magson many benefits NOT because it

单选题What's the position of the head of human resources management in American companies?

单选题 Even plants can run a fever, especially when they are under attack by insects or disease. But{{U}} (1) {{/U}}humans, plants can have their temperature{{U}} (2) {{/U}}from 3,000 feet away—straight up. A decade ago,{{U}} (3) {{/U}}the infrared scanning technology developed for military purpose and other satellites, physicist Stephen Paley{{U}} (4) {{/U}}a quick way to take the temperature of crops to determine{{U}} (5) {{/U}}ones are under stress. The goal was to let farmer{{U}} (6) {{/U}}target pesticide spraying{{U}} (7) {{/U}}rain poison on a whole field, which{{U}} (8) {{/U}}include plants that don't have the pest problem. Even better, Paley's Remote Scanning Services Company could detect crop problem before they became{{U}} (9) {{/U}}to the eye. Mounted on a plane flown at 3,000 feet{{U}} (10) {{/U}}, an infrared scanner measured the heat emitted by crops. The data were{{U}} (11) {{/U}}into a color-coded map showing{{U}} (12) {{/U}}plants were running "fevers". Farmers could then spot spray, using 50 to 70 percent less pesticide than they{{U}} (13) {{/U}}would. The bad news is that Paley's company closed down in 1984, after only three years. Farmers{{U}} (14) {{/U}}the new technology and long-term backers were hard{{U}} (15) {{/U}}. But with the renewed concern about pesticides on produce, and refinements in infrared scanning, Paley hopes to{{U}} (16) {{/U}}into operation. Agriculture experts have no doubt about the technology works. "This technique can be used{{U}} (17) {{/U}}75 percent of agricultural land in the United States," says George Oerther of Texas A＆M. Ray Jackson, who recently retired from the Department of Agriculture, thinks{{U}} (18) {{/U}}infrared crop scanning could be adopted by the end of the decade. But{{U}} (19) {{/U}}Paley finds the financial backing{{U}} (20) {{/U}}he failed to obtain 10 years ago.

单选题From the last paragraph, we know that

单选题The basic reason for the mistake Washington has committed is that

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions: {{/B}}Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} About three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, think the country is on the wrong track. About two-thirds of the public disapprove of the job performance of President Bush, and an even higher number disdain Congress. The media are excited about the prospect of a wealthy businessman running for President as an independent who could tap into broad public disgruntlement with the partisan politicians in Washington. 2007? Yes. But also 1992, The main difference between the two situations is that Michael Bloomberg is richer—and saner—than Ross Perot. But one similarity might be this: the American people were wrong then and may be wrong now. The widespread pessimism in the early 1990s about the course of the country turned out to be unwarranted. The rest of the decade featured impressive economic growth, a falling crime rate, successful reform of the welfare system and a reasonably peaceful world. Perhaps the problems weren't so bad in the first place, or perhaps the political system produced politicians, like Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, who were able to deal with the problems. But, in any case, the country got back on course. That's not to say all was well in the 1990s, especially in foreign policy. Responsibilities in places ranging from Bosnia to Rwanda to Afghanistan were shirked, and gathering dangers weren't dealt with. Still, the sour complaints and dire predictions of 1992—oh, my God, the budget deficit will do us in! —were quickly overtaken by events. What's more, the fear of many conservatives that we might be at the mercy of unstoppable forces of social disintegration turned out to be wrong. Indeed, the dire predictions were rendered obsolete so quickly that one wonders whether we were, in 1992, really just indulging in some kind of post-cold-war victory. Sometimes the public mood is ... well, moody. Today we're moody again. We are obviously fighting a difficult and, until recently, badly managed war in Iraq, whose outcome is uncertain. This accounts for much of the pessimism. It also doesn't help that the political system seems incapable of dealing with big problems like immigration, an energy policy and health care. Still, is the general feeling that everything is going to the dogs any more justified today than it was 15 years ago? Not really. Think of it this way: Have events in general gone better or worse than most people would have predicted on Sept. 12, 20017 There's been no successful second attack here in the U. S. —and very limited terrorist successes in Europe or even in the Middle East. We've had 5 1/2 years of robust economic growth, low unemployment and a stock-market recovery. Social indicators in the U. S. are mostly stable or improving—abortions, teenage births and teenage drug use are down and education scores are up a bit. As for American foreign policy since 9/11, it has not produced the results some of us hoped for, and there are many legitimate criticisms of the Bush Administration's performance. But, in fact, despite the gloom and doom from critics left and right (including, occasionally, me), the world seems to present the usual mixed bag of difficult problems and heartening developments. The key question, of course, is the fate of Iraq. A decent outcome—the defeat of alQaeda in what it has made the central front in the war on terrorism and enough security so there can be peaceful rule by a representative regime—seems to me achievable, if we don't lose our nerve here at home. With success in Iraq, progress elsewhere in the Middle East will be easier. The balance sheet is uncertain. But it is by no means necessarily grim.