单选题The British codes are described as being______.

单选题Car makers have long used sex to sell their products. Recently, how. ever, both BMW and Renault have based their latest European marketing campaigns around the icon of modern biology. BMW's campaign, which launches its new 3-series sports saloon in Britain and Ireland, shows the new creation and four of its earlier versions zigzagging around a landscape made up of giant DNA sequences, with a brief explanation that DNA is the molecule responsible for the inheritance of such features as strength, power and intelligence. The Renault offering, which promotes its existing Laguna model, employs evolutionary theory even more explicitly. The company's television commercials intersperse clips of the car with scenes from a lecture by Steve Jones, a professor of genetics at University of London. BMW's campaign is intended to convey the idea of development allied to heritage. The latest product, in other words, should be viewed as the new and improved scion of a long line of good cars. Renault's message is more subtle. It is that evolution works by gradual improvements rather than sudden leaps (in this, Renault is aligning itself with biological orthodoxy). So, although the new car in the advertisement may look like the old one, the external form conceals a number of significant changes to the engine. While these alterations are almost invisible to the average driver, Renault hopes they will improve the car's performance, and ultimately its survival in the marketplace. Whether they actually do so will depend, in part, on whether marketers have .read the public mood correctly. For, even if genetics really does offer a useful metaphor for automobiles, employing it in advertising is not without its dangers. That is because DNA's public image is ambiguous. In one context, people may see it as the cornerstone of modern medical progress. In another, it will bring to mind such controversial issues as abortion, genetically modified foodstuffs, and the sinister subject of eugenics. Car makers are probably standing on safer ground than biologists. But even they can make mistakes. Though it would not be obvious to the casual observer, some of the DNA which features in BMW's ads for its nice, new car once belonged to a woolly mammoth—a beast that has been extinct for 10,000 years. Not, presumably, quite the message that the marketing department was trying to convey.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Erroneous virtues are running out of control in our culture. I don't know how many times my 13-year-old son has told me about classmates who received ＄10 for each "A" grade on their report cards—hinting that I should do the same for him should he ever receive an A. Whenever he approaches me on this subject, I give him the same reply: forget it! This is not to say that I would never praise my son for doing well in school. But my praise is not meant to reward or elicit future achievements, but rather to express my genuine delight in the satisfaction he feels at having done his best. Doling out ＄10 sends out the message that the feeling alone isn't good enough. As a society, we seem to be on the brink of losing our internal control—the ethical boundaries that guide our actions and feelings. Instead, these ethical standards have been eclipsed by external "stuff" as a measure of our worth. We pass this obscene message on to our children. We offer them money for learning how to convert fractions to decimals. Refreshments are given as a reward for reading. In fact, in one national reading program, a party awaits the entire class if each child reads a certain number of books within a four-month period. We call these things incentives, telling ourselves that if we can just reel them in and get them hooked, then the internal rewards will follow. I recently saw a television program where unmarried, teenage mothers were featured as the participants in a program that offers a ＄10 a week "incentive" if these young women don't get pregnant again. Isn't the daily plight of being a single, teenaged mother enough to discourage them from becoming pregnant again? No, it isn't, because we as a society won't allow it to be. Nothing is permitted to succeed or fail on its own merits anymore. A staple diet of candy bars makes an ordinary apple or orange seem sour. Similarly, an endless parade of incentives corrodes our ability to feel a genuine sense of inner peace (or inner conflict). The simple virtues of honesty, kindness and integrity suffer from an image problem and are in desperate need of better publicity. One way to do this is by example. I fear that in our so-called upwardly mobile world we are on a downward spiral towards becoming morally bankrupt. We may soon render ourselves worthless inside, while desperately clinging to a shell of appearances.

单选题By mentioning "double-dipping" (Paragraph 4), the author is talking about ______.

单选题The conclusion can be drawn from the text that in the wake of Andersen% scandal, the government

单选题In traditionally female jobs, attractiveness ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The U. S. Bureau has estimated that the population of the United States could approach 300 million in 2000 and will be 400 million in 2020. And the U. S. Department of Commerce estimates that the average U.S. per capita income will increase from ＄3400 in 1969 to the equivalent of＄8300(assuming a 1967 price level) in the year 2000,2.5 times as much as that of 1969. According to government statistics, in the United States, there are over 110 million cars and "more people" means "more cars". By the end of twenties of next century, the population of the United States will have doubled that of today and the number of automobiles will be doubled as well. And in twenty-year's time the per capita income will also be 2.5 times higher than it is. If this increase income is spent on more and larger automobiles, larger houses, and increased consumption of other material goods, the results could cause catastrophic resource exhaustion, and pollution. Take the increase of the consumption of oil for instance. The consumption is so huge that the reserves might last only a decade or two if not supplemented by imports. Ten years ago it appeared that nuclear power would solve the anticipated energy crisis. Although supplies of uranium fuel were known to be limited and might become exhausted in half a century, the nuclear power plant has for a long time been a favorite project. But work on it has met with grave problems. The fear of possible atomic explosion and the problem of disposing of polluting by-product waste have slowed down the construction of further nuclear plants. Eventually atomic technology may be able to control these problems, but at present there seems to be little agreement among atomic scientists about when this can be achieved.

单选题When Dr. John W. Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California and a leading nuclear critic, speaks of "ecocide" in his adversary view of nuclear technology, he means the following. A large nuclear plant like that in Kalkar, the Netherlands, would produce about 200 pounds of plutonium each year. One pound, released into the atmosphere, could cause 9 billion cases of lung cancer. This waste product must be stored for 500,000 years before it is of no further danger to man. In the anticipated reactor economy, it is estimated that there will be 10,000 tons of this material in Western Europe, of which one table-spoonful of plutonium-239 represents the official maximum permissible body burden for 200,000 people. Rather than being biodegradable, plutonium destroys biological properties. In 1972 the .U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration ruled that the asbestos level in the work place should be lowered to 2 fibers per cubic centimeter of air, but the effective date of the ruling has been delayed until now. The International Federation of Chemical and General Workers' Unions report that the 2-fiber standard was based primarily on one study of 290 men at a British asbestos factory. But when the workers at the British factory had been reexamined by another physician, 40--70 percent had X-ray evidence of lung abnormalities. According to present medical information at the factory in question, out of a total of 29 deaths thus far, seven were caused by lung cancer. An average European or American worker comes into contact with six million fibers a day. "We are now, in fact, finding cancer deaths within the family of the asbestos worker," states Dr. Irving Selikoff, of the Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. It is now also clear that vinyl chloride, a gas from which the most widely used plastics are made, causes a fatal cancer of the blood-vessel cells of the liver. However, the history of the research on vinyl chloride is, in some ways, more disturbing than the "Watergate cover- up. " "There has been evidence of potentially serious disease among polyvinyl chloride workers for 25 years that has been incompletely appreciated and inadequately approached by medical scientists and by regulatory authorities," summed up Dr. Selikoff in the New Scientist. At least 17 workers have been killed by vinyl chloride because research over the past 25 years was not followed up. And for over 10 years, workers have been exposed to concentrations of vinyl chloride 10 times the "safe limit" imposed by Dow Chemical Company.

单选题Sleep is a funny thing. We' re taught that we should get seven or eight hours a night, but a lot of us get by just fine on less, and some of us actually sleep too much. A study out of the University of Buffalo last month reported that people who routinely sleep more than eight hours a day and are still tired are nearly three times as likely to die of stroke--probably as a result of an underlying disorder that keeps them from snoozing soundly. Doctors have their own special sleep problems. Residents are famously sleep deprived. When I was training to become a doctor, it was not unusual to work 40 hours in a row without rest. Most of us took it in stride, confident we could still deliver the highest quality of medical care. Maybe we shouldn' t have been so sure of ourselves. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association points out that in the morning after 24 hours of sleeplessness, a person' s motor performance is comparable to that of someone who is legally intoxicated. Curiously, surgeons who believe that operating under the influence is grounds for dismissal often don' t think twice about operating without enough sleep. "I could tell you horror stories," says Jaya Agrawal, president of the American Medical Student Association, which runs a website where residents can post anonymous anecdotes. Some are terrifying. "I was operating after being up for over 36 hours, "one writes. "I literally fell asleep standing up and nearly face planted into the wound. " "Practically every surgical resident I know has fallen asleep at the wheel driving home from work," writes another. "I know of three who have hit parked cars. Another hit a convenience store on the roadside, going [105kin/h]. " "Your own patients have become the enemy," writes a third," because they are the one thing that stands between you and a few hours of sleep. " Agrawal' s organization is supporting the Patient and Physician Safety and Protection Act of 2001, introduced last November by Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan. Its key provisions, modeled on New York State's regulations, include an 80-hour workweek and a 24-hour work-shift limit. Most doctors, however, resist such interference. Dr. Charles Binkley, a senior surgery resident at the University of Michigan, agrees that something needs to be done but believes "doctors should be bound by their conscience, not by the government. " The U. S. controls the hours of pilots and truck drivers. But until such a system is in place for doctors, patients are on their own. If you' re worried about the people treating you, you should feel free to ask how many hours of sleep they have had. Doctors, for their part, have to give up their pose of infallibility and get the rest they need.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Every year 100 million holiday-makers are drawn to the Mediterranean. With one third of the world's tourist trade, it is the most popular of all the holiday destinations: it is also the most polluted. It has only 1 percent of the world's sea surface, but carries more than half the oil and tar floating on the waters. Thousands of factories pour their poison into the Mediterranean, and almost every city, town and village on the coast sluices its sewage, untreated, into the sea. The result is that the Mediterranean, which nurtured so many civilizations, is gravely ill-the first of the seas to fall victim to the abilities and attitudes that evolved around it. And the population does not merely stifle the life of the sea-it threatens the people who inhabit and visit its shores. Typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, polio, viral hepatitis and food poisoning are endemic in the area, and there are periodic outbreaks of cholera. The mournful litany of disease is caused by sewage. Eight-five percent of the waste from the Mediterranean's 120 coastal cities is pushed out into the waters where their people and visitors bathe and fish. What is more, most cities just drop it in straight off the beach; rare indeed are the places like Cannes and Tel Aviv which pipe it even half a mile offshore. Less than 100, 000 of Greece's four million coastal people have their sewage properly treated-and Greece, is one of the cleaner countries of the northern shore. The worst parts of the sea are Israeli/Lebanon coast and between Barcelona and Genoa, which flushes out over 200 tons of sewage each year for every mile of its length. Not surprisingly, vast areas of the shallows are awash with bacteria and it doesn't take long for these to reach people. Professor William Brumfit of the Royal Free Hospital once calculated that anyone who goes for a swim in the Mediterranean has a one in seven chance of getting some sort of disease. Other scientists say this is an overestimate; but almost all of them agree that bathers are at risk. An even greater danger lurks in the seductive seafood dishes that add so much interest to holiday menu. Shellfish are prime carriers of many of the most vicious diseases of the area. They often grow amid pollution. And even if they don't they are frequently infected by the popular practice of "freshening them up" -throwing filthy water over them in markets. Industry adds its own poisons. Factories cluster round the coastline, and even the most modern rarely has proper waste-treatment plant. They do as much damage to the sea as sewage. Fifteen thousand factories foul the Italian Lihurian Riviera. Sixty thousand pollute the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia, Sicily and the west Italian coast! The lagoon of Venice alone receives the effluents of 76 factories. Thousands of tons of pesticides are blown off the fields into the sea, detergents from millions of sinks kill fish, and fertilizers, flushed out to sea, nourish explosions of plankton which cover bathers with itchy slime. Then there is the oil-130, 000 tons pouring each year from ships, 115, 000 tons more from industries round the shore. Recent studies show that the Mediterranean is four times as polluted as the north Atlantic, 20 times as bad as the north-east Pacific. Apart from the nine-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean is landlocked, virtually unable to cleanse itself. It takes 80 years for the water to be renewed, through the narrow, shallow straits, far too slow a process to cope with the remorseless rush of pollution.

单选题Roger Rosenblatt's book Black Fiction, in attempting to apply literary rather than sociopolitical criteria to its subject, successfully alters the approach taken by most previous studies. As Rosenblatt notes, criticism of Black writing has often served as a pretext for expounding on Black history. Addison Gayle's recent work, for example, judges the value of Black Fiction by overtly political standards, rating each work according to the notions of Black identity which it propounds. Although fiction assuredly springs from political circumstances, its authors react to those circumstances in ways other than ideological, and talking about novels and stories primarily as instruments of ideology circumvents much of the fictional enterprise. Rosenblatt's literary analysis discloses affinities and connections among works of Black Fiction which solely political studies have overlooked or ignored. Writing acceptable criticism of Black Fiction, however, presupposes giving satisfactory answers to a number of questions. First of all, is there a sufficient reason, other than the racial identity of the authors, to group together works by Black authors? Second, how does Black Fiction make itself distinct from other modem fiction with which it is largely contemporaneous? Rosenblatt shows that Black Fiction constitutes a distinct body of writing that has an identifiable, coherent literary tradition. Looking at novels written by Black over the last eighty years, he discovers recurring concerns and designs independent of chronology. These structures are thematic, and they spring, not surprisingly, from the central fact that the Black characters in these novels exist in a predominantly white culture, whether they try to conform to that culture or rebel against it. Black Fiction does leave some aesthetic questions open. Rosenblatt's thematic analysis permits considerable objectivity ; he even explicitly states that it is not his intention to judge the merit of the various works -- yet his reluctance seems misplaced, especially since an attempt to appraise might have led to interesting results. For instance, some of the novels appear to be structurally diffuse. Is this a defect, or are the authors working out of, or trying to forge a different kind of aesthetic? In addition, the style of some Black novels, like Jean Toomer's Cane, verges on expressionism or surrealism; does this technique provide a counterpoint to the prevalent theme that portrays the fate against which Black heroes are pitted, a theme usually conveyed by more naturalistic modes of expression? In spite of such omissions, what Rosenblatt does include in his discussion makes for an astute and worthwhile study. Black Fiction surveys a wide variety of novels, bringing to our attention in the process some fascinating and little-known works like James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Its argument is tightly constructed, and its forthright, lucid style exemplifies levelheaded and penetrating criticism.

单选题The author seems to believe that widened wage gap can be attributed to

单选题We used to think that the left brain controlled your thinking and that the right brain controlled your heart. But neuroscientists have learned that it's a lot more complicated. In 2007, an influential paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Functions found that while most of us process emotions through the right hemisphere of the brain, about 35 % of people—especially victims of trauma—process their hurt and anger through their left brain, where logic and language sit. That may be because they had worked so hard to explain, logically, why they were suffering. But pushing emotions through the left brain taxed it: these people performed significantly worse on memory tests. Now a new paper—out in the September issue of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease—further complicates the picture with a surprising finding: whether you are right-handed, left-handed or ambidextrous (which the authors call, rather delightfully, " inconsistently handed") seems to be an important clue in understanding how you use your brain to process emotions. It's been known for some time that lefties and the ambidextrous are more prone to negative emotions. The new study shows that they also have a greater imbalance in activity between the left and right brains when they process emotions. Of course, you can't be sure which comes first: maybe angry people are more out of balance, or maybe the inability to find equilibrium makes you angry. As for the left-handed: maybe they're more angry because the world is designed for the right-handed majority. The study also used an interesting method to find that angry people are, literally, hot-headed: the authors of the paper—led by Ruth Propper, a psychology professor at Merrimack College in Massachusetts- measured brain-hemisphere activation with a relatively old method called tympanic membrane temperature, which is essentially how hot it is in your inner ear. If you get angry a lot, your head tends to be warmer. One problem is that the study was small —just 55 undergraduates participated (they were paid $20 each for having to endure ear-temperature tests and psychological questioning). Also, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, while peer-reviewed, is one of less-respected psychology journals. Still, I like the study just because it explains that when you get hot under the collar, you are actually hot under the collar.