单选题Which of the following is true according to the first paragraph?

单选题As stated in the text, those who grabbed "the largest piece" in the "economic pie" in the 1990s were

单选题According to the passage, all of the following will result from human competition EXCEPT ______.

单选题It is difficult to describe the countryside during the period under consideration, partly because the inhabitants______

单选题According to the passage what do we know about Galileo?

单选题It can be inferred from the passage that the author would most probably agree with which of the following statements about the relationship between the Industrial Revolution and about the demand for luxury goods and services in eighteenth century England?

单选题What really works to make sustainable changes in diet and lifestyle? It"s probably not what you think. Years of clinical research proves that the real keys are pleasure, joy and freedom, not our power of will or austerity (苦行). Joy of living is sustainable; fear of dying is not. Why? Because life is to be enjoyed. There"s no point in giving up something you enjoy unless you get something back that"s even better, and quickly. When people eat more healthfully, exercise, quit smoking, manage stress better, and love more, they find that they feel so much better, so quickly, it reconstruct the reason for making these changes from fear of dying to joy of living. Fortunately, the latest studies show how dynamic and powerful are the mechanisms that control our health and well-being. When you exercise and eat right: Your brain receives more blood flow and oxygen, so you become smarter, think more clearly, have more energy, and need less sleep. Two studies showed that just walking for three hours per week for only three months caused so many new nerve cells to grow that it actually increased the size of people"s brains! Your face receives more blood flow, so your skin glows more and wrinkles less. You look younger and more attractive. In contrast, an unhealthy diet, lasting emotional stress and smoking reduce blood flow to your face so you age more quickly. Smoking accelerate aging because nicotine (尼古丁) causes your blood vessel to become narrower, which decreases blood flow to your face and makes it wrinkle prematurely. This is why smokers look years older than they really are. One of the most interesting findings in this study was that the mothers" perceptions of stress were more important than what was objectively occurring in their lives. The researchers made a survey among women and asked them to rate on a three-point scale how stressed they felt each day, and how out of control their lives felt to them. The women who perceived that they were under heavy stress had significantly shortened and damaged telomeres (染色体端粒) compared with those who felt more relaxed. Conversely, some of the women who felt relaxed despite raising a disabled child had more normal-appearing telomeres. In other words, if you feel stressed, you are stressed.

单选题When Newsweek recently asked 1,000 U. S. citizens to take America's official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn't name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn't correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn't even circle Independence Day on a calendar. Don't get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they've existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. And they've been lamenting the ignorance of their peers ever since pollsters started publishing these dispiriting surveys back in Harry Truman's day. According to a study by Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, the yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World War II have averaged out to "slightly under 1 percent. " But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it's becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us. To appreciate the risks involved, it's important to understand where American ignorance comes from. In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs. The Europeans outdid us. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown us lagging behind our First World peers. Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the U. S. political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. In many European countries, parliaments have proportional representation, and the majority party rules without having to "share power with a lot of subnational governments," notes Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. In contrast, we're saddled with a nonproportional Senate; a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and near-constant elections for every imaginable office (judge, sheriff, school-board member, and so on). "Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote," says Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen. "You know you're going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more. " It doesn't help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, "it's like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn't even speak English. " When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U. S. actually holds its own against Europe. For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed—and they've changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. We suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability. Whether that's a treatable affliction or a terminal illness remains to be seen. But now's the time to start searching for a cure.

单选题When an associate of the Mus6e d'Art Moderne Andr6-Malraux in Normandy flipped through the catalogue for the auction of impressionist art at Sotheby's in New York on November 2nd, he made a startling discovery. On sale was "Blanchisseuses souffrant des dents", a painting by Edgar Degas, which had been stolen in 1973 from a museum where it had been on loan from the Louvre. After being alerted by the French authorities, Sotheby's dropped the painting from the sale. Now an investigation is under way. The owner is likely to lose it without compensation when it is returned to France. Like most art collectors, the owner had no art-title insurance, which would have provided compensation for the painting's value. "Theft accounts for only a quarter of title disputes," says Judith Pearson, a co-founder of ARIS, a small insurance firm that has been selling title insurance since 2006 and which was taken over by Argo Group, a bigger insurer, earlier this month. Three-quarters of squabbles occur in cases of divorce or inheritance. A work of art may also carry liens after being used as a collateral for a loan. More rarely, two or more artists may collaborate but then disagree about who has authority to flog their co-production. Does the risk of title disputes warrant the cost of title insurance? ARIS charges a one-off premium of between 1.75% and 6% of the art's value. In return the company will cover the legal costs in case of a title dispute and compensate for the agreed value of the art if their client loses the ownership dispute. ARIS has so far written about 1,000 policies and has not yet had a claim. An alternative to art-title insurance is for collectors to do due diligence about the provenance of a work of art themselves. Yet many do not have the time or the tools to carry out such research, which is a complex undertaking as there is no central register of art ownership. And even sophisticated collectors get it wrong, as the clients of Salander-O'Reilly, a New York art gallery, discovered. It collapsed spectacularly in 2007 after it emerged that it had dealt in stolen art and defrauded its clients in a Madoffian manner for years. Such cases are exceptional, but as the market booms and the value of art increases, more art lovers will look for additional assurances that their art is really theirs.

单选题According to the text, HDTV

单选题The reluctance of France to accept the global war is due to the fact that

单选题The word "demographers" ( Line 1, Paragraph 7 ) most probably means ______.

单选题Which of the following statements is NOT true about John McDermott?

单选题Our ability to think has long been considered central to what makes us human. Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment (1) even our most abstract thoughts. This includes thinking up random numbers or deciding (2) to review positive or negative experiences. "Advocates of traditional (3) of cognition would be surprised," says Tobias Loetscher at the University of Melbourne in Parkville, Australia. "They (4) consider human reasoning to involve abstract cognitive processes without any connection to body or space." Until recently, the (5) has been that our bodies (6) only to our most basic interactions with the environment, (7) sensory and motor processes. The new results suggest that our bodies are also (8) to produce abstract thought, and that even seemingly (9) activities have the power to influence our thinking. (10) that our bodies may play a role in thought can be found in the metaphors we use to describe situations, (11) "I was given the cold shoulder" or "she has an excellent grasp of relativity". Thirty years ago, such (12) led the linguist and philosopher George Lakoff at the University of Califor- nia, Berkeley, together with philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon in Eugene, to (13) "conceptual metaphor theory", the notion that we think of abstract concepts (14) how our bodies function. Now (15) for the theory has started to (16) in. In 2008, (17) , researchers found that people made to feel socially (18) reported feeling physically colder. Now, Loetscher and his colleagues have (19) our ability to think of random numbers--an example of abstract thought--to bodily (20)

单选题In an age of perpetual digital connectedness, why do people seem so disconnected? In a Duke University study, researchers found that from 1985 to 2004, the percentage of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled, to 25%; the same study found that overall, Americans had one-third fewer friends and confidants than they did two decades ago. Another recent study, by researchers at the University of Michigan, found that college students today have significantly less empathy than students of generations past did. The reason, psychologists speculate, may have something to do with our increasing reliance on digital communication and other forms of new media. It's possible that instead of fostering real friendships off-line, e-mail and social networking may take the place of them—and the distance inherent in screen-only interactions may breed feelings of isolation or a tendency to care less about other people. After all, if you don't feel like dealing with a friend's problem online, all you have to do is log off. The problem is, as empathy wanes, so does trust. And without trust, you can't have a cohesive society. Consider the findings of a new study co-authored by Kevin Rockmann of George Mason University and Gregory Northcraft at the University of Illinois who specializes in workplace collaboration. Northcraft says high-tech communications like e-mail and (to a lesser extent) videoconferencing—which are sometimes known as "lean communication" because they have fewer cues like eye contact and posture for people to rely on—strip away the personal interaction needed to breed trust. In a business setting—as in all other social relationships outside the workplace—trust is a necessary condition for effective cooperation within a group. "Technology has made us much more efficient but much less effective," said Northcraft in a statement. "Something is being gained, but something is being lost. The something gained is time, and the something lost is the quality of relationships. And quality of relationships matters." In Rockmann and Northcraft's study, 200 students were divided into teams and asked to manage two complicated projects: one having to do with nuclear disarmament; the other, price fixing. Some groups communicated via e-mail, some via videoconference and others face to face. In the end, those who met in person showed the most trust and most effective cooperation; those using e-mail were the least able to work together and get the job done. Northcraft thinks this is because real-life meetings, during which participants can see how engaged their colleagues are, breed more trust. Over e-mail, meanwhile, confirmation of hard work gets lost, which tends to encourage mutual slacking off.

单选题It took ______ for the world to increase its population from 1 billion to 4 billion.