单选题The question of whether war is inevitable is one which has concerned many of the world"s great writers. Before considering this question, it will be useful to introduce some related concepts. Conflict, defined as opposition among social entities directed against one another, is distinguished from competition, defined as opposition among social entities independently striving for something which is in inadequate supply. Competitors may not be aware of one another, while the parties to a conflict are. Conflict and competition are both categories of opposition, which has been defined as a process by which social entities function in the disservice of one another. Opposition is thus contrasted with cooperation, the process by which social entities function in the service of one another. These definitions are necessary because it is important to emphasize that competition between individuals or groups is inevitable in a world of limited resources, but conflict is not. Conflict, nevertheless, is very likely to occur, and is probably an essential and desirable element of human societies. Many authors have argued for the inevitability of war from the premise that in the struggle for existence among animal species, only the fittest survive. In general, however, this struggle in nature is competition, not conflict. Social animals, such as monkeys and cattle, fight to win or maintain leadership of the group. The struggle for existence occurs not in such fights, but in the competition for limited feeding areas and for occupancy of areas free from meat-eating animals. Those who fail in this competition starve to death or become victims to other species. This struggle for existence does not resemble human war, but rather the competition of individuals for jobs, markets, and materials. The essence of the struggle is the competition for the necessities of life that are insufficient to satisfy all. Among nations there is competition in developing resources, trades, skills, and a satisfactory way of life. The successful nations grow and prosper; the unsuccessful decline. While it is true that this competition may induce efforts to expand territory at the expense of others, and thus lead to conflict, it cannot be said that war-like conflict among nations is inevitable, although competition is.

单选题According to Dr. Weiss, the second cool and dry period eventually

单选题The "MyDoom" virus could presage a generation of computer attacks by organised gangs aiming to extract ransoms from online businesses, experts said yesterday. The warning came as the website run by SCO, a company that sells Unix computer software, in effect disappeared from the web under a blizzard of automated attacks from PCs infected by the virus, which first appeared a week ago. The "MyDoom-A" version of the virus is reckoned to be the worst to have hit the internet, in terms of the speed of its spread, with millions of PCs worldwide believed to be infected. Such "zombie" machines begin to send out hundreds of copies of the virus every hour to almost any e-mail address in their files. On Sunday they began sending automated queries to SCO's website, an attack that will continue until 12 February. The attack is the web equivalent of ringing the company's doorbell and running away a million times a second, leaving its computers unable to deal with standard requests to view its pages. "You have to wonder about the time limit," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the antivirus company Sophos. "Someone could go to SCO after the 12th and say, 'If you don't want this to happen again, here are our demands'." Raimund Genes, European president of the security software firm Trend Micro, said: "Such a programme could take out any major website on the internet. It's not terrorism, but it is somebody who is obviously upset with SCO" SCO has earned the enmity of computer users through a lawsuit it has filed against IBM. SCO claims ownership of computer code it says IBM put into the free operating system Linux, and is demanding licence fees and damages of $1bn. Mr. Cluley said: "It might be that whoever is behind this will say to SCO, 'if you don't want the next one to target you, drop the lawsuit'." SCO has offered $250,000 (￡140,000) for information leading to the arrest of the person or people who wrote and distributed MyDoom. Nell Barrett, of the security company Information Risk Management, said, "I would give a lot of credence to the idea of gangs using viruses to extort money. It's hard for law enforcement to track them down, because they're using machines owned by innocent people." A second variant of MyDoom will start attacking part of Microsoft's website later today. The antivirus company MessageLabs said it had blocked more than 16 million copies of the virus in transit over the net so far. But millions more will have reached their targets.

单选题According to the passage, the NIS program

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Europe is desperate to succeed in business. Two years ago, the European Union's Lisbon summit Set a goal of becoming the world's leading economy by 2010. But success, as any new age executive coach might tell you, requires confronting the fear of failure. That is why Europe's approach to bankruptcy urgently needs reform. In Europe, as in the United States, many heavily indebted companies are shutting up shop just as the economy begins to recover. Ironically, the upturn is often the moment when weak firms finally fail. But America's failures have a big advantage over Europe's weaklings: their country's more relaxed approach to bankruptcy. In the United States the Chapter 11 law makes going bust an orderly and even routine process. Firms in trouble simply apply for breathing space from creditors. Managers submit a plan of reorganization to a judge, and creditors decide whether to give it a go or to come up with one of their own. Creditors have a say in whether to keep the firm running, or to liquidate it. If they keep it running, they often end up with a big chunk of equity, if not outright control. But shutting a bust European company is harder in two other ways. First, with no equivalent of Chapter 11, bankruptcy forces companies to stop trading abruptly. That damages the value of the creditors' potential assets, and may also cause havoc for customers. Second, a company that trades across the European Union will find that it has to abide by different bankruptcy laws in the 15 member states, whose courts and administrators may make conflicting and sometimes incompatible stipulations. The absence of provision for negotiations between companies and creditors increases the temptation for government to step in. When governments do not come to the rescue, the lack of clear rules can lead to chaos. As a result of all this, Europe's teetering firms miss the chance to become more competitive by selling assets to others who might manage them more efficiently. Their sickly American rivals survive, transformed, to sweep the field. An opportunity now exists to think again about Europe's approach to bankruptcy. The European Union is expected to issue a new directive on the subject in May. Germany has begun to update its insolvency law. And last year Britain produced a white paper saying that a rigid approach to bankruptcy could stifle the growth needed to meet Lisbon's goals.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} In 1879, Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School, a remarkable 40-year chapter in this country's failed social policy regarding Native Americans. Pratt's faith could be simply described as: "Kill the Indian, Save the Man!" to eradicate any manifestations of their native culture. When four decades of forcible education ended in 1918, it wasn't clear what Pratt's experiment had killed and what it had saved. But there was one indisputably notable legacy-- the Carlisle football team. In the early 20th century, the Carlisle Indians ascended to the pinnacle(顶点) of the collegiate game. In those years, it began to engage all the Ivy football powers on the gridiron(运动场). And from 1911 to 1913, including the season in which the legendary Jim Thorpe returned from the Olympics to score 25 touchdowns, Carlisle had a 38-3 record, including a 27-6 rout of West Point. Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins has produced a fascinating new book, "The Real All Americans": The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation (Doubleday. $24.95), that examines the Carlisle legend in wonderful detail. At the turn of the century, football was exploding on the college scene, particularly at the Ivy elites, where the sons of the gentry could prepare for the rigors of leadership on the gridiron. They preferred their football brutal. Conversely, the Carlisle team was undermanned and seriously undersized. But Carlisle was blessed with gifted athletes and a wizard of a coach, Pop Warner. Because Carlisle couldn't match the brute force of its rivals, Warner created an entirely new brand of football, relying on speed, deception and guile. In that 1903 Harvard game, Carlisle used the hidden ball trick to score on the second-half kickoff. While the return man pretended to cradle the ball, another player had it tucked into a pocket sewn inside the back of his jersey and ran unmolested 103 yards for a touchdown. Carlisle developed new blocking techniques that compensated for its size disadvantage: the spiral throw that put the long pass, with its premium(优势) on speed, into the offense and a repertoire of fakes; reverses and misdirection that remain a central part of the game. It took brains to concoct the schemes and intelligence to execute them. These innovations did not go unrecognized. After Carlisle trounced Army in 1912, The New York Times hailed the conquerors from Carlisle for playing "the most perfect brand of football ever seen in America." Still, today this country celebrates football like no other sport. Jenkins does a marvelous job of making an intimate connection between our beloved, modern game and the unlikely team that, a century ago, helped make it what it is today.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Michael Porter, who has made his name throughout the business community by advocating his theories of competitive advantages, is now swimming into even more shark-infested waters, arguing that competition can save even America's troubled health-care system, the largest in the world. Mr. Porter argues in "Redefining Health Care" that competition, if properly applied, can also fix what ails this sector. That is a bold claim, given the horrible state of America's health-care system. Just consider a few of its failings: America pays more per capita for health care than most countries, but it still has some 45m citizens with no health insurance at all. While a few receive outstanding treatment, he shows in heart-wrenching detail that most do not. The system, wastes huge resources on paperwork, ignores preventive care and, above all, has perverse incentives that encourage shifting costs rather than cutting them outright. He concludes that it is "on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors and limited access to care." Many observers would agree with this diagnosis, but many would undoubtedly disagree with this advocacy of more market forces. Doctors have an intuitive distrust of competition, which they often equate with greed, while many public-policy thinkers argue that the only way to fix America's problem is to quash the private sector's role altogether and instead set up a government monopoly like Britain's National Health Service. Mr. Porter strongly disagrees. He starts by acknowledging that competition, as it has been introduced to America's health system, has in fact done more harm than good. But he argues that competition has been introduced piecemeal, in incoherent and counter-productive ways that lead to perverse incentives and worse outcomes:" health-care competition is not focused on delivering value for patients," he says. Mr. Porter offers a mix of solutions to fix this mess, and thereby to put the sector on a genuinely competitive footing. First comes the seemingly obvious (but as yet unrealized) goal of data transparency. Second is a redirection of competition from the level of health plans, doctors, clinics and hospitals, to competition "at the level of medical conditions, which is all but absent". The authors argue that the right measure of "value" for the health sector should be how well a patient with a given health condition fares over the entire cycle of treatment, and what the cost is for that entire cycle. That rightly emphasizes the role of early detection and preventive care over techno-fixes, pricey pills and the other fallings of today's system. If there is a failing in this argument, it is that he sometimes strays toward naive optimism. Mr. Porter argues, for example, that his solutions are so commonsensical that private actors in the health system could forge ahead with them profitably without waiting for the government to fix its policy mistakes. That is a tempting notion, but it falls into a trap that economists call the fallacy of the $20 bill on the street. If there really were easy money on the pavement, goes the argument, surely previous passers-by would have bent over and picked it up by now. In the same vein, if Mr. Porter's prescriptions are so sensible that companies can make money even now in the absence of government policy changes, why in the world have they not done so already? One reason may be that they can make more money in the current sub-optimal equilibrium than in a perfectly competitive market—which is why government action is probably needed to sweep aside the many obstacles in the way of Mr. Porter's powerful vision.

单选题The author' s attitude forwards the work conducted by the nine judges seems to be

单选题Which of the following causes concerns of the public and the scientists?

单选题College sports in the United States are a huge deal. Almost all major American universities have football, baseball, basketball and hockey programs, and (1) millions of dollars each year to sports. Most of them earn millions (2) as well, in television revenues, sponsorships. They also benefit (3) from the added publicity they get via their teams. Big-name universities (4) each other in the most popular sports. Football games at Michigan regularly (5) crowds of over 20,000. Basketball's national collegiate championship game is a TV (6) on a par with any other sporting event in the United States, (7) perhaps the Super Bowl itself. At any given time during fall or winter one can (8) one's TV set and see the top athletic programs—from schools like Michigan, UCLA, Duke and Stanford— (9) in front of packed houses and national TV audiences. The athletes themselves are (10) and provided with scholarships. College coaches identify (11) teenagers and then go into high schools to (12) the country's best players to attend their universities. There are strict rules about (13) coaches can recruit—no recruiting calls after 9 p. m., only one official visit to a campus—but they are often bent and sometimes (14) . Top college football programs (15) scholarships to 20 or 30 players each year, and those student-athletes, when they arrive (16) campus, receive free housing, tuition, meals, books, etc. In return, the players (17) the program in their sport. Football players at top colleges (18) two hours a day, four days a week from January to April. In summer, it's back to strength and agility training four days a week until mid-August, when camp (19) and prepares for the opening of the September-to-December season begins (20) . During the season, practice, s last two or three hours a day from Tuesday to Friday. Saturday is game day. Mondays are an officially mandated day of rest.

单选题The author is in favor of the opinion that

单选题If there is one thing that could halt the ascent of social networks, it is the thorny question of privacy. This is (1) because it goes right to the (2) of the social-networking business model. In order to attract users, sites need to offer ways for members to restrict the information about themselves that gets shared with a wider (3) . But if a site allows members to keep too much of their information privacy, there will be less (4) that can be turned into profit through advertising and various other means, so the network's business will (5) . There is some evidence that people are starting to become more (6) about the way in which they (7) their data, which could have longer-term (8) for the networks' growth. Research published last year showed that some 60% of adults are restricting (9) to their online profiles. (10) , the social networks have partly brought this on themselves. In order to offer a better service, many have created (11) sets of privacy controls that allow users to switch between different levels of protection to (12) their online data. Facebook has excessive controls that can be adjusted to create different levels of (13) . Default settings for younger people on social-networking sites are often more (14) than those for adults to (15) they are protected from unwanted attention. Social networks (16) applause for developing these fine-grained controls. But their desire for profit can put them on a (17) course with privacy activists, regulators and their users. One bone of contention is social networks' (18) to draw attention to their privacy statements. The reason for this might be concern about "privacy reassurance": the worry that (19) people to privacy as a potential issue will make them less (20) to share things, even if robust privacy controls are available.