单选题The people who answer the phone get an endless stream of calls from people who are extremely upset that their electricity got turned off just because they failed to pay their bill for 297 months, or people asking questions like "Is it OK to operate an electric appliance while taking a bath?" So let's say that you have a genuine problem with your electric bill. The people in "Customer Service" have no way of knowing that you're an intelligent, rational person. They're going to lump you in with the usual not-so-bright public. As far as they're concerned, the relevant facts, in any dispute between you and them, are these: 1. They have a bunch of electricity. 2. You need it. 3. So shut up. This is why, more and more, the people in "Customer Service" won't even talk to you. They prefer to let you talk to the convenient Automatic Phone Answering System until such a time as you die of old age "... If your FIRST name has more than eight letters, and your LAST name begins with 'H' through 'L' press 251 NOW. If your first name has LESS than eight letters, and your last name contains at least two 'E' s, press 252 NOW. If your..." So is there any way that you, the lowly consumer, can gain the serious attention of a large and powerful business? I am pleased to report that there IS a way, which I found out about thanks to an alert reader who sent me a news report from Russia. According to this report, a Russian electric company got into a dispute with a customer and cut off the customer's electricity. This customer, however, happened to be a unit of the Russian Army. So the commander ordered a tank to drive over to the electric company's office and aim its gun at the windows. The electricity was turned right back on. On behalf of consumers everywhere, I want to kiss this military commander on the lips. I mean, what a GREAT concept. Imagine, as a consumer, how much more seriously your complaint would he taken if you were complaining from inside a vehicle capable of reducing the entire "Customer Service" department to tiny smoking pieces. What I am saying is: Forget the Automated Phone Answering System. Get a tank. Perhaps you are thinking: "But a tank costs several million dollars, not including floor mats. I don't have that kind of money." Don't be silly. You're a consumer, right? You have credit cards, right? Perhaps you are thinking: "Yes, but how am I going to pay the credit-card company?" Don't be silly. You have a tank, right?

单选题"My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas." Many American school children are taught this sentence to help them remember the order of the planets of the solar system. Soon though, this may change because, on July 29th, a team of astronomers announced the discovery of a very distant celestial body larger than Pluto. The researchers claim that the new body—which they are informally calling Xena—should be classified as a planet. The new body—temporarily named 2003UB313—orbits the Sun once every 560 years. It is currently over 14 billion kilometres away, about three times farther out than Pluto, making it the most distant object ever discovered in the solar system. The researchers think it is part of the Kuiper belt, a ring of rocky objects that extends beyond Neptune. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory and David Rabino witz of Yale University discovered the object in data recorded at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego in October 2003, but its motion did not become apparent until they reanalysed the data in January 2005. The question of whether or not the new body should be considered a planet has rekindled the debate over what exactly counts as a planet. A handful of objects of similar size to, but smaller than, Pluto have been discovered in the Kuiper belt over the past few years. These have not been considered planets, mainly because they were smaller than Pluto. But 2003UB313 is larger than Pluto. If Pluto is a planet, shouldn"t it be as well? The case is not so clear cut. Many astronomers argue that Pluto should not be considered a planet. It is more like a large asteroid, they hold. Meanwhile, Dr. Brown asserts that as Pluto has historically been considered a planet, anything larger should also be considered one. Ultimately, the International Astronomical Union, a group of professional astronomers, will end this existential anxiety. Dr. Brown expects the process to take months, and the team is not allowed to reveal its suggested name until then. Since most Greek and Roman names have already been used, he and his colleagues have previously drawn upon Native American and Inuit mythology for names. He will only hint that the new name comes from a different tradition altogether. Time will tell whether mother wilt be serving "nine polished xylophones", "nine pizzas" or just "noodles".

单选题We may believe that such words as thought and thinking______

单选题According to the author, NPR's opposition to low power radio is surprising because NPR______.

单选题Guthrie's contiguity principle offers practical suggestions for how to break habits. One application of the threshold method involves the time young children spend on academic activities. Young children have short attention spans, so the length of time they can sustain work on one activity is limited. Most activities are scheduled to last no longer than 30 to 40 minutes. However, at the start of the school year, attention spans quickly wane and behavior problems often result. To apply Guthrie's theory, a teacher might, at the start of the year, limit activities to 15 to 20 minutes. Over the next few weeks the teacher could gradually increase the time students spend working on a single activity. The threshold method also can be applied to teaching printing and handwriting. When children first learn to form letters, their movements are awkward and they lack fine motor coordination. The distances between lines on a page are purposely wide so children can fit the letters into the space. If paper with narrow lines is initially introduced, students' etters would spill over the borders and students might become frustrated. Once students can form letters within the larger borders, they can use paper with smaller borders to help them refine their skills. The fatigue method can be applied when disciplining disruptive students who build paper airplanes and sail them across the room. The teacher can remove the students from the classroom, give them a large stack of paper, and tell him to start making paper airplanes. After the students have made several airplanes, the activity should lose its attraction and paper will become a cue for not building airplanes. Some students continually race around the gym when they first enter their physical education class. To employ the fatigue method, the teacher might decide to have these students continue to run a few more laps after the class has begun. The incompatible response method can be used with students who talk and misbehave in the media center. Reading is incompatible with talking. The media center teacher might ask the students to find interesting books and read them while in the center. Assuming that the students find the books enjoyable, the media center will, over time, become a cue for selecting and reading books rather than for talking with other students. In a social studies class some students regularly fall asleep. The teacher realized that using the board and overhead projector while lecturing was very boring. Soon the teacher began to incorporate other elements into each lesson, such as experiments, and debates, in an attempt to involve students and raise their interest in the course.

单选题The crotch rivet would not have been removed, ______.

单选题Positive surprises from government reports on retail sales, industrial production, and housing in the past few months are leading economists to revise their real gross domestic product forecasts upward, supporting the notion that the recession ended in December or January. Bear in mind: This recovery won't have the vitality normally associated with an upturn. Economists now expect real GDP growth of about 1. 5% in the first quarter. That's better than the 0. 4% the consensus projected in December, but much of the additional growth will come from a slower pace of inventory drawdowns, not from surging demand. Moreover, the economy won't grow fast enough to help the labor markets much. The only good news there is that jobless claims have fallen back from their spike after September 11 and that their current level suggests the pace of layoffs is easing. The recovery also does not mean the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates soon. The January price indexes show that inflation remains tame. Consequently, the Fed can take its time shifting monetary policy from extreme accommodation to relative neutrality. Perhaps the best news from the latest economic reports was the January data on industrial production. Total output fell only 0. 1%, its best showing since July. Factory output was flat, also the best performance in six months. Those numbers may not sound encouraging, but manufacturers have been in recession since late 2000, The data suggest that the factory sector is finding a bottom from which to start its recovery. Production of consumer goods, for instance, is almost back up to where it was a year ago. That's because consumer demand for motor vehicles and other goods and the housing industry remained healthy during the recession, and they are still growing in early 2002. Besides, both the monthly homebuilding starts number and the housing market index for the past two months are running above their averages for all of 2001, suggesting that homebuilding is off to a good start and probably won't be a big drag on GDP growth this year. Equally important to the outlook is how the solid housing market will help demand for home-related goods and services. Traditionally, consumers buy the bulk of their furniture, electronics and textiles within a year of purchasing their homes. Thus, spending on such items will do well this year, even as car sales slip now that incentives are less attractive. Look for the output of consumer goods to top year-ago levels in coming months. Even the business equipment sector seems to have bottomed out. Its output rose 0. 4% in January, led by a 0.6% jump computer gear. A pickup in orders for capital goods in the fourth quarter suggests that production will keep increasing--although at a relaxed pace--in coming months.

单选题It can be inferred from the text that the author feels that

单选题Elections often tell you more about what people are against than what they are for. So it is with the European ones that took place last week in all 25 European Union member countries. These elections, widely trumpeted as the world's biggest-ever multinational democratic vote, were fought for the most part as 25 separate national contests, which makes it tricky to pick out many common themes. But the strongest are undoubtedly negative. Europe's voters are angry and disillusioned-and they have demonstrated their anger and disillusion in three main ways. The most obvious was by abstaining. The average overall turnout was just over 45%, by some margin the lowest ever recorded for elections to the European Parliament. And that average disguises some big variations: Italy, for example, notched up over 70%, but Sweden managed only 37%. Most depressing of all, at least to believers in the European project, was the extremely low vote in many of the new member countries from central Europe, which accounted for the whole of the fall in turnout since 1999. In the biggest, Poland, only just over a fifth of the electorate turned out to vote. Only a year ago, central Europeans voted in large numbers to join the EU, which they did on May 1st. That they abstained in such large numbers in the European elections points to early disillusion with the European Union-as well as to a widespread feeling, shared in the old member countries as well, that the European Parliament does not matter. Disillusion with Europe was also a big factor in the second way in which voters protested, which was by supporting a ragbag of populist, nationalist and explicitly anti-EU parties. These ranged from the 16% who backed the UK Independence Party, whose declared policy is to withdraw from the EU and whose leaders see their mission as "wrecking" the European Parliament, to the 14% who voted for Sweden's Junelist, and the 27% of Poles who backed one of two anti-EU parties, the League of Catholic Families and Selfdefence. These results have returned many more Eurosceptics and trouble-makers to the parliament: on some measures, over a quarter of the new MEPS will belong to the "awkward squad". That is not a bad thing, however, for it will make the 'parliament more representative of European public opinion. But it is the third target of European voters' ire that is perhaps the most immediately significant, the fact that, in many EU countries, old and new, they chose to vote heavily against their own governments. This anti-incumbent vote was strong almost everywhere, but it was most pronounced in Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Sweden. The leaders of all the four biggest European Union countries, Tony Blair in Britain, Jacques Chirac in France, Gerhard Schroder in Germany and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, were each given a bloody nose by their voters. The big question now is how Europe's leaders should respond to this. By a sublime (or terrible) coincidence, soon after the elections, and just as The Economist was going to press, they were gathering in Brussels for a crucial summit, at which they are due to agree a new constitutional treaty for the EU and to select a new president for the European Commissi6n. Going into the meeting, most EU heads of government seemed determined to press ahead with this agenda regardless of the European elections--even though the atmosphere after the results may make it harder for them to strike deals.

单选题The author indicates explicitly that which of the following records has been a source of information in her investigation?

单选题When the United States and Korea(SOK) announced their new free-trade agreement last month, the news was mainly economic. The deal would give American farmers and bankers alike better access to Korean consumers and help Korean companies push more electronics, cars and textiles into the United States. Largely unreported was the political angle--the U.S.-Korea(SOK) free trade agreement comes at precisely the moment when America's military presence on the Korean Peninsula is rapidly diminishing, anti-U.S. nationalism in Korea(SOK) is growing and China is playing an ever more important leadership role in the region. This FTA is much more significant in strategic than economic terms. It is the same about any number of trade deals in Asia these days. While free-trade agreements have always been somewhat political, solidifying national relationships, the use of FTAs in geopolitical jockeying(竞赛) is reaching new heights in East Asia. Since 1997, the number of FTAs in the region has risen from seven to 38. Last time we saw this sort of frenzied bilateral activity was back in the 1930s. That worries some economists, who fear that all the free-trade politicking will further erode an already beleaguered global trading system, and create a snowball effect of countermeasures. It's no accident that the activity in the region has increased since 2004, which marked the beginning of a massive free trade agreement between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. China offered countries like Laos and Cambodia an "early harvest," unilaterally opening up markets for hundreds of different kinds of agricultural products. That in turn helped smooth the way for a reduction in tension in hot spots like the disputed South China Sea territories. FTAs are becoming a key instrument for great-power diplomacy. That worries rivals, who are rushing to find their own partners. The Japanese, for example, have always been cautious when it comes to bilateral agreements. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently announced a new push for more Japanese FTAs in the region. Meanwhile, the EU is trying desperately to push its way back into the region, recently announcing plans to negotiate its own deals with both South Korea and the ASEAN nations. How will all the wheeling and dealing end? Not with more efficient trading. A recent map of Asian trade deals shows an increasingly complicated "spaghetti bowl" hindering broader global efforts to liberalize trade. Such deals have a disproportionately negative effect on small and medium-sized enterprises, representing as much as 80 percent of jobs in some parts of Asia. Already, the U.S.-Korea(SOK) deal is causing grousing(不满) in Japan, which would take a hit as Korean competitors no longer have. to deal with U.S. tariffs. Still, that probably won't turn the tide -- the most important criterion in motivating a country to seek FTAs, well ahead of economic reform, was--surprise --politics.