单选题Text 1 Among Bloomberg's web pages on April 7th appeared a story that looked ordinary enough: PairGain, an American telecom equipment manufacturer, was to be bought by an Israeli company for about twice its market value. The company's stock price, predictably, rocketed from $8.50 to $11.13. All fine and normal—except that the story wasn't true. Somebody had copied Bloomberg's logo and layout and posted a bogus report on the Bloomberg site. When Pair Gain queried the report, it was taken off, and the share price crashed again. Bloomberg is now suing unnamed parties who posted the page. As more and more of life moves on to the Internet, so the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction on it becomes more and more of a worry. This problem springs from the Internet's central virtue: low barriers to entry. In the real world, being a publisher costs a great deal of money. You have to have manufacturing facilities and distribution networks. So real-world publishers have a great deal invested in their reputations and consequently need to be careful about what they print. On the Internet, being a publisher costs next to nothing. Many Internet publishers, therefore, have little to lose from printing untruths and plenty to gain in notoriety if the story they put out is sensational enough. What's more, faking the real-world newspaper, which has to be both manufactured and distributed, would be next to impossible; faking an Internet page is dead easy. Not all the efforts of the lowering of the barriers to entry are bad. Big, established news organisations can be too cautious and too protective of their more powerful sources. Many scandals have been unearthed first by outsiders with scrappy news sheets and little to lose by way of influential contacts. The Internet is a golden age for what used to be the newsletter. The downside is the ease with which error spreads. Rarely, though, falsehood takes the form of international fraud, more often it appears as malicious gossip, slovenly reporting and Chinese whispers. Last year everybody on the Internet knew that Tommy Hilfiger, a fashion designer, had made racist comments on the Operah Winfrey Show. Except that he didn't. Pierre Salinger, former television newsman, claimed at a news conference that TWA 800, a passenger plane that crashed into the Atlantic killing all aboard in 1996, had been downed by a missile—all on the basis of a web page of dubious origin. Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune wrote her column one week as a spoof graduation speech. Somehow this column became tagged on the web, as Kurt Vonnegut's commencement speech at MIT. Cyberspace can also be risky, for now, because even sophisticated people can be gullible about what they read there. This may be because of a lag between technology and perception. Smartly produced pages, and things on screens, impress us with an authority that springs from the resources needed to produce them in the old paper medium. Perhaps everyone should be more worldly wise about what can turn up on the web.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Most of us have seen a dog staring at, sometimes snarling at, and approaching a reflection of itself. For most animals, seeing their own image in a mirror acts as a social stimulus. But does the dog recognize itself, or does the reflection simply signal a potential companion or threat? This question is interesting for a number of masons. Apart from curiosity about the level of animals' understanding, research on serf- recognition in animals has several benefits. It provides some insight into the evolutionary significance of this skill of serf-recognition and into the level and kinds of cognitive competence that the skill requires. Such research also indicates the kinds of learning experiences that determine the development of self-recognition. In addition, work with animals fosters the use of techniques that are not dependent on verbal responses and that may therefore be suitable for use with preverbal children. The evidence indicates that dogs and almost all other nonhumans do not recognize themselves. In a series of clever experiments, however, Gallup has shown that the chimpanzee does have this capacity. Gallup exposed chimpanzees in a small cage to a full-length mirror for ten consecutive days. It was observed that over this period of time the number of serf-directed responses increased. These behaviors included grooming parts of the body while watching the results, guiding fingers in the mirror, and picking at teeth with the aid of the mirror. Describing one chimp, Gallup said, "Marge used the mirror to play with and inspect the bottom of her feet; she also looked at herself upside down in the mirror while suspended by her feet from the top of the cage; she was also observed to stuff celery leaves up her nose using the mirror for purposes of visually guiding the stems into each nostril." Then the researchers devised a further test of serf-recognition. The chimps were anesthetized and marks were placed over their eyebrows and behind their ears, areas the chimps could not directly observe. The mirror was temporarily removed from the cage, and baseline data regarding their attempts in touch these areas were recorded. The data clearly suggest that chimps do recognize themselves, or are self-aware, for their attempts to touch the marks increased when they viewed themselves. Citing further evidence for this argument, Gallup noted that chimpanzees with no prior mirror experience did not direct behavior to the marks when they were first exposed to the mirror; that is, the other chimpanzees appeared to have remembered what they looked like and do have responded to the marks because they noticed changes in their appearance.

单选题 This time last year three out of four 16 to 24-year-olds were wearing the white band of Make Poverty History. Whatever the campaign may or may not have achieved in Africa, it briefly inspired millions in Britain. A joy, but also a revelation, for this was the moment when I saw how ready people were to take a little bit of action for a big cause. It may also explain how the small movement I helped to found has become a rather large phenomenon. Don't think changing the world can start by something as simple as shutting down your computer at night? Those marching were different crowds from 20 years ago. Make Poverty History made few formal demands. No slogans, no forms, not even meetings if you didn't fancy them. It was activism lite-more a brand than an organization. Show solidarity wherever you go-fashionably of course-do more, if and when you can. The future of active citizenship may depend on understanding why it ignited a generation. If social engagement is a funnel (a tube or pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom) turned on its side, about a quarter of a million people in the UK are at the narrow end, serial activists, responsible for 80 per cent of our community action. Most charities are here, focusing their efforts on these committed citizens. Our organization, We Are What We Do, is at the mouth of the funnel targeted at people who don't recycle or think about fair trade. It is styled as a brand, inspiring people to make the small changes that will make a big difference if enough of us do the same. Our first book-Change the World for a Fiver-featured 50 simple actions, from not spitting out your gum to declining plastic bags. All began by doing something small. Some of the 800 who are buying the book every day remain usefully but lightly engaged. For our new book, Change the World 9 to 5, we decided to focus on the workplace, where most of us spend most of our waking hours. Actions range from the entertaining (smile!); the symbolic (turn off your phone charger when not in use) and the serious (learn to save a life). In working with We Are What We Do I have moved from the view that the sum of individual actions can help to make a difference to the belief that ultimately it is the only thing that ever does. The smallest act has a value of its own.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} You could benefit from flipping through the pages of I Can't Believe You Asked That, a book by author Phillip Milano that's subtitled, A No-Holds-Barred Q & A About Race, Sex, Religion, and Other Terrifying Topics. For the past seven years, Milano--who describes himself as "a straight, white middle class married guy raised in an affluent suburb of Chicago'--has operated yforum, com, a Web site that was created to get us talking. Through the posting of probing, provocative and sometimes simply inane questions and the answers they generate, people are encouraged to have a no-holds-barred exchange on topics across racial, ethnic and cultural lines. More often than not, the questions grow out of our biases and fears and the stereotypes that fuel misunderstanding among us. As with the Web site, Milano hopes his book will be a social and cultural elixir. "The time is right for a new culture of curiosity' to begin to unfold, with people finally breaking clown the {{U}}last barrier{{/U}} to improve race and cultural relations" by actually talking to each other about their differences, Milano said in an e-mail message to me. Milano wisely used the Internet to spark these conversations. In seven years, it has generated 50,000 postings--many of them questions that people find hard to ask in a face-to-face exchange with the subjects of their inquiries. But in his book, which was published earlier this month, Milano gives readers an opportunity to read the questions and a mix of answers that made it onto his Web site. "I am curious about what people who have been blind from birth 'see' in their dreams," a 13-year- old boy wanted to know. "Why do so many mentally disabled people have such poor-looking haircuts and 'nerdy' clothes?" a woman asked. "How do African-Americans perceive God?" a white teenager wanted to know. "Do they pray to a white God or a black God?" Like I said, these questions can generate a range of emotions and reactions. But the point of Milano's Web site, and his book, is not to get people mad, but to inform us "about the lives and experiences" of others. Though many of the answers that people offered to the questions posed in his book are conflicting, these responses are balanced by the comments of experts whose responses to the queries also appear in the book. Getting people to openly say what they are thinking about things that give rise to stereotypes and bigotry has never been easy. Most of us save those conversations for gatherings of people who look or think like us.

单选题Abstract art also called nonobjective art, or nonrepresentational art, is painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays no part. All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract—elements of form, color, line, tone, and texture. Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization—and exposition dominated over expressive function. Abstract art has its origins in the 19th century. The period characterized by so vast a body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual perception. The period of Romanticism had put forward ideas about art that denied classicism's emphasis on imitation and idealization and had instead stressed the role of imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors. Gradually many painters of this period began to accept the new freedom and the new responsibilities implied in the coalescence of these attitudes. Maurice Denis's statement of 1890, "It should be remembered that a picture—before being a war-horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort—is essentially a fiat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order," summarizes the feeling among the Symbolist and Postimpressionist artists of his time. All the major movements of the first two decades of the 20th century, in some way emphasized the gap between art and natural appearances. There is, however, a deep distinction between abstracting from appearances, even if to the point of unrecognizability, and making works of art out of forms not drawn from the visible world. During the several years preceding World War I, such artists as Robert Delaunay and Vladimir Tatlin turned to fundamentally abstract art. (Kandinsky is generally regarded as having been the first modem artist to paint purely abstract pictures containing no recognizable objects.) The majority of even the progressive artist regarded the abandonment of every degree of representation with disfavor, however. During World War I the emergence of the De Stijl group and of the Dada group further widened the spectrum of abstract art. Abstract art did not flourish between World Wars I and II. Beset by totalitarian politics and by art movements placing renewed emphasis on imagery, such as Surrealism, it received little notice. But after World War II an energetic American school of abstract painting called Abstract Expressionism emerged and had wide influence. Since the 1950s abstract art has been an accepted and widely practiced approach within European and American painting and sculpture. Abstract art has puzzled and indeed confused many people, but for those who have accepted its non referential language there is no doubt as to its value and achievements.

单选题The effect of the baby boom on the schools helped to make possible a shift in thinking about the role of public education in the 1920's. In the 1920's, but especially (1) the Depression of the 1930's, the United States experienced a (2) birth rate. Then with the prosperity (3) on by the Second World War and the economic boom that followed it, young people married and (4) households earlier and began to (5) larger families than had their (6) during the Depression. Birth rates rose to 102 per thousand in 1946, 106.2 in 1950, and 118 in 1955. (7) economics was probably the most important (8) , it is not the only explanation for the baby boom. The increased value placed (9) the idea of the family also helps to (10) this rise in birth rates. The baby boomers began streaming (11) the first grade by the mid-1940's and became a (12) by 1950. The public school system suddenly found itself (13) The wartime economy meant that few new schools were buih between 1940 and 1945. (14) , large numbers of teachers left their profession during that period for better-paying jobs elsewhere. (15) , in the 1950's, the baby boom hit an antiquated and inadequate school system. Consequently, the custodial rhetoric of the 1930's no longer made (16) ; keeping youths ages sixteen and older out of the labor market by keeping them in school could no longer be a high (17) for an institution unable to find space and staff to teach younger children. With the baby boom, the focus of educators (18) turned toward the lower grades and back to basic academic skills and (19) . The system no longer had much (20) in offering nontraditional, new, and extra services to older youths.

单选题By "at best, the results point to the least change people can expect", (Lines 7～8, Paragraph 3) the researchers try to tell us that

单选题According to the passage, Google's IPO is to share market recovery as

单选题Demand for the most common cosmetic surgery procedures, like breast enlargements and nose jobs, has increased by more than 400 per cent over the last decade. According to Dr. Dai Davies, of the Plastic Surgery Partnership in Hammersmith, the majority of cosmetic surgery patients are not chasing physical perfection. Rather, they are driven to fantastic lengths to improve their appearance by a desire to look normal. "What we all crave is to look normal, and normal is what is prescribed by the advertising media and other external pressures. They give us a perception of what is physically acceptable and we feel we must look like that." In America, the debate is no longer about whether surgery is normal; rather, it centres on what age people should be before going under the knife. New York surgeon Dr. Gerard Imber recommends "maintenance" work for people in their thirties. "The idea of waiting until one needs a heroic transformation is silly," he says. "By then, you"ve wasted 20 great years of your life and allowed things to get out of hand." Dr. Imber draws the line at operating on people who are under 18, however. "It seems that someone we don"t consider old enough to order a drink shouldn"t be considering plastic surgery." In the UK cosmetic surgery has long been seen as the exclusive domain of the very rich and famous. But the proportionate cost of treatment has fallen substantially, bringing all but the most advanced laser technology within the reach of most people. Dr. Davies, who claims to "cater for the average person", agrees. He says: "I treat a few of the rich and famous and an awful lot of secretaries. Of course, ￡3,000 for an operation is a lot of money. But it is also an investment for life which costs about half the price of a good family holiday." Dr. Davies suspects that the increasing sophistication of the fat injecting and removal techniques that allow patients to be treated with a local anaesthetic in an afternoon has also helped promote the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Yet, as one woman who recently paid ￡2,500 for liposuction to remove cellulite from her thighs admitted, the slope to becoming a cosmetic surgery veteran is a deceptively gentle one. "I had my legs done because they"d been bugging me for years. But going into the clinic was so low key and effective it whetted my appetite. Now I don"t think there"s any operation that I would rule out having if I could afford it."

单选题 As human children are unusually dependent far an unusually long time, it's obvious that every society must provide a domestic context in which the children are brought up and educated. In present-day English, the word "family" has two meanings: firstly, the{{U}} (1) {{/U}}group of parents and children; and secondly, a{{U}} (2) {{/U}}of relations who might be expected to{{U}} (3) {{/U}}at a wedding or a{{U}} (4) {{/U}}. At the first level, my brothers and sisters and myself are all in the same{{U}} (5) {{/U}}as children, but in different ones as parents; but at the second{{U}} (6) {{/U}}, we're all in the same family from start to finish. As nuclear families become more{{U}} (7) {{/U}}, families of relations become more dispersed (分散). The young mother can still talk to her Mum on the phone, but she can't ask her to{{U}} (8) {{/U}}for a few minutes to watch the baby. Ideas about the{{U}} (9) {{/U}}of women have been changing: wives are thought to be the{{U}} (10) {{/U}}of their husbands rather than their (11) . But perhaps they're more{{U}} (12) {{/U}}enslaved to their children than before. The point is that there doesn't seem to be any{{U}} (13) {{/U}}. There is a genuine{{U}} (14) {{/U}}between the right of the woman to be treated as a free and self-respected{{U}} (15) {{/U}}, and the right of the child to demand care and{{U}} (16) {{/U}} We have created for ourselves three{{U}} (17) {{/U}}: social equality of men and women;{{U}} (18) {{/U}}of the marriage; and lifelong love and{{U}} (19) {{/U}}between parents and children. However, we have{{U}} (20) {{/U}}a social system in which it's quite impossible for these factors to co-exist.

单选题Some landlords made agreements comparatively favourable to farmers in that they wanted to ______

单选题It is generally recognized in the world that the second Gulf War in Iraq is a crucial test of high-speed web. For decades, Americans have anxiously (1) each war through a new communication (2) , from the early silent film of World War I to the 24-hour cable news (3) of the first Persian Gulf War. Now, (4) bombs exploding in Baghdad, a sudden increase in wartime (5) for online news has become a central test of the (6) of high-speed Internet connections. It is also a good (7) both to attract users to online media (8) and to persuade them to pay for the material they find there, (9) the value of the Cable News Network persuaded millions to (10) to cable during the last war in Iraq. (11) by a steady rise over the last 18 months in the number of people with high-speed Internet (12) , now at more than 70 million in the United States, the web sites of many of the major news organizations have (13) assembled a novel collage (拼贴) of (14) video, audio reports, photography collections, animated weaponry (15) , interactive maps and other new digital reportage. These Internet services are (16) on the remarkable abundance of sounds and images (17) from video cameras (18) on Baghdad and journalists traveling with troops. And they have found a (19) audience of American office workers (20) their computers during the early combat.

单选题Gerald Holton is a ______.

单选题The U.S. integrated steel companies complain that, to modernize their technologies, they are in need of

单选题America acted quickly and decisively to the Great Recession, while Europeans seem paralyzed by the distant past. The swift and decisive U.S. response to the financial crisis and deep recession should be a model for other large developed economies. Yet Europe, which is now facing sovereign debt and banking problems and a slowdown in growth, seems reluctant to follow America's lead. The United States emerged from its 2008 economic cataclysm with relative speed because policymakers learned from history. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had famously internalized the charge that the central bank had contributed to the Great Depression. The frenzied response of the Bernanke Fed—guaranteeing all sorts of assets and markets, purchasing mortgage-backed securities, adopting a zero-interest rate policy, and expanding its balance shed to $ 2.3 trillion can be seen as signs of overcompensation. And from Japan's experience in the 1990s, the Fed learned the need for speed. While some critics have charged the U.S. fiscal stimulus was too small, the data suggest that the stimulus package has been a significant contributor to job retention and growth. Increased federal spending was needed in part to combat the declines in government spending by states. In the United States, the federal government helped prop up the states with injections of cash. In Europe, which lacks a powerful overarching federal government with the ability to tax and spend, fiscal policy is all bitter medicine and no spoonfuls of sugar. From the United Kingdom to the Czech Republic, and all points in between, governments are cutting spending and raising taxes. But these contractionary policies will retard economic growth, which will in turn lead to more problems for the banks. The European Central Bank and European governments are embracing fiscal austerity and comparative monetary tightness in these extraordinary times because they remain paralyzed by a terrible fear of inflation. The Federal Reserve has the dual mandate of controlling inflation and promoting employment. The ECB, by contrast, is concerned primarily with inflation. Never mind that the OECD data on inflation shows it is under control. The Europeans remain freaked out by the prospect of inflation at some point in the future. In its outlook, the OECD writes. "On inflation, the issue is not whether it is a risk today—it is not but whether it will be a risk in two years' time. " In the United States, the desire to avoid mistakes made in the distant and recent past has led to perhaps excessively vigorous fiscal and monetary policies. For Europeans, the desire to avoid mistakes made in the distant past has led to an excess of caution. When they look to history for guidance, European policymakers aren't looking at Washington in 2009, or Japan in the 1990s, or the United States in the 1930s. Rather, they look to Europe in the 1920s, a period when hyperinflation ravaged economies, disrupted the social order, destroyed social democracies, and led to the rise of Nazism.