单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Can computer viruses ever be a force for progress? In the wild west of the online world, the archetypal baddies are computer viruses and worms. These self-replicating programs are notorious for wreaking havoc in the systems of unwary users. But, as in the west, not all gunslingers wear black hats. Some virus writers wish their fellow users well, and have been spreading viruses that are designed to do good, not harm. Cheese Worm, which appeared a few weeks ago, attempts to fix computers that have been compromised by the Lion Worm. The Lion Worm is dangerous. It infects computers that use the Linux operating system, and creates multiple "backdoors" into the infected computer. It then e-mails information about these backdoors to people who wish to misuse that computer for nefarious purposes such as "denial of service" attacks on websites. (Such attacks bombard a site with so many simultaneous requests for access that it comes out with its hands up.) That might sound like a good thing. So might VBS. Noped. A @ mm. This virus, which arrives as an e-mail attachment, searches a user's hard drive for specific files which the (unknown) virus writer believes contain child pornography. If the virus finds any files on the proscribed list, it e-mails a copy of the file in question to a random recipient from a list of American government agencies, with an explanatory note. The notion of "good" viruses may sound novel; but, according to Vesselin Bontchev, a virus expert with Frisk Software International in Iceland, it is not. However, early attempts to create beneficial viruses—for example, programs that compressed or encrypted files without asking a user's permission—were resented, because they represented a loss of control over a user's computer, and a diversion of data-processing resources. Inoculating computers against infection sounds like a good idea, but fails because any unauthorised changes are suspicious. Cheese Worm, even though it is designed to help the user whose disk it ends up on, suffers from the same objection. And VBS. Noped. A @ mm, whatever social benefits its author might think it has, is not even meant to do that. If it works, it will harm the user rather than help him. It is little more than cyber-vigilantism. Appropriate to the wild west, perhaps, but if cyberspace is to be civilised, other solutions will have to be found.

单选题Symantec might not block

单选题The words “good sense”( Par

单选题In 1993, I published a book, The Rage of a Privileged Class, whose central thesis was that even the most gifted African-Americans assumed that they would never crash through America's glass ceiling—no matter how talented, well educated, or hardworking they were. Few people of any race would claim that true equality has arrived; but so much has changed since Rage came out. Color is becoming less and less a burden; race is less and less an immovable barrier. My new research explores how that phenomenon is changing the way people of all races view the American landscape. I polled two groups of especially accomplished people of color. One is the African-American alumni of Harvard Business School. The other is the alumni of A Better Chance, a program, founded in 1963, that sends ambitious, talented youngsters to some of the nation's best secondary schools. Generations, I concluded from my study, mattered deeply—with their defining characteristics rooted in America's evolving racial dynamics. Generation 1, in this categorization, is the civil-rights generation—those (born before 1945) who participated in, or simply bore witness to, the defining 20th-century battle for racial equality. It is the generation of whites who, in large measure, saw blacks as alien beings and the generation of blacks who, for the most part, saw whites as irremediably prejudiced. Gen 2s (born between 1945 and 1969) were much less racially constrained—though they remained, in large measure, stuck in a tangle of racial stereotypes. Gen 3s (born between 1970 and 1995) saw race as less of a big deal. And that ability to see a person beyond color has cleared the way for a generation of Believers—blacks who fully accept that America means what it says when it promises to give them a shot. That new reality made itself clear when I compared black Gen 1 Harvard M. B. A. s with their Gen 3 counterparts. Seventy-five percent of Gen 1s said blacks faced "a lot" of discrimination, compared with 49 percent of Gen 3s. Twenty-five percent of Gen 1s thought their educational attainments put them "on an equal professional footing with white peers or competitors with comparable educational credentials," compared with 62 percent of Gen 3s. Ninety-three percent of Gen 1s saw a glass ceiling at their current workplaces, compared with 46 percent of Gen 3s. I am not about to make a statistical argument based on these numbers, but the message nonetheless seems clear. In the time since the Gen 1s came on the scene, a revolution has occurred. Those uptight suburbanites who couldn't imagine socializing with, working for, or marrying a "Negro," who thought blacks existed in an altogether different dimension, who could no more see dining with a black person than dining with a giraffe, have slowly given way to a new generation that embraces—at least consciously—the concept of equality. Americans have, in some substantial way, re-created each other—to an extent that our predecessors might find astounding.

单选题A huge population of red fire ants has bedeviled Texas farmers for years. By some estimates the insectscost state businesses close to $1 billion a year due to crop and machinery destruction. Killing the ants and their nests has not proven easy. Texas A＆M researchers have discovered that the phorid fly from South America will lay eggs on the red fire ants and the maggots which are hatched eat away at the ant's brains, eventually causing their heads to fall off. Someone at the university was willing to underwrite the work to solve a problem. That investment was almost certainly much less than the $1 billion a year that fire ants cost businesses in the state. A recession does not stop advancements in technology. It just makes companies so frightened of risk that they choose not to make the investment in the red fire ant projects. In the last week, the two most successful technology companies in the world, IBM and Google have announced major new products. IBM released "stream computing" applications that allow businesses to look at and analyze huge amounts of data in real time. The most important product of Google allows the company's customers to take very large amounts of search data and organize it into spreadsheets. These are developments that will probably help the firms take business away from their competitors. The shares of Google and IBM have handily outperformed those of all the other large tech companies based in the U. S. such as Hewlett Packard (HPQ), Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO), and Oracle (ORCL). Each of the companies is blessed with substantial earnings and technology staffs in the tens of thousands. But the firms are not all viewed the same, at least by investors who trade tens of millions of their shares each day. In most ways, IBM and Google are not like one another at all. IBM makes its money selling expensive hardware, client services, and software to companies, most of which are very large, and to governments. Google has millions of customers who pay nothing to use its services. It has millions of advertisers who spend money to reach people who look at search results and most of these marketers are very small. What the companies do have in common is a willingness to take risks, probably risks with long odds in order to launch new products. These products may be failures, but they are well enough researched and designed that they have a good chance of keeping IBM and Google ahead of the competition even if that does not immediately involve significant new revenue. The red fire ant problem never goes away. Unsolved problems in every industry cost companies money. Sometimes companies do not even know that their problems can be solved. The phorid fly is an obscure species. So is software that can analyze huge amounts of data in real time.

单选题Easterlin seems to suggest that

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} 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 multination- al 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 Eu- rope, which accounted for the whole of the fall in turnout since 1999. In the biggest, Po- land, 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 pro- tested, 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 Commission. 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 Catholic Church is changing in America at its most visible point: the parish church where believers pray, sing and clasp hands across pews to share the peace of God. Today there are fewer parishes and fewer priests than in 1990 and fewer of the nation's 65 million Catholics in those pews. And there's no sign of return. Some blame the explosive 2002 clergy sexual abuse scandal and its financial price tag. But a study of 176 Roman Catholic dioceses shows no statistically significant link between the decline in priests and parishes and the $ 772 million the church has spent to date on dealing with the scandal. Rather, the changes are driven by a constellation of factors: ·Catholics are moving from cities in the Northeast and Midwest to the suburbs, South and Southwest. ·For decades, so few men have become priests that one in five dioceses now can't put a priest in every parish. ·Mass attendance has fallen as each generation has become less religiously observant. ·Bishops--trained to bless, not to budget--lack the managerial skills to govern multimillion-dollar institutions. All these trends had begun years before the scandal piled on financial pressures to cover settlements, legal costs, care and counseling for victims and abusers. The Archdiocese of Boston, epicenter of the crisis, sold chancery property to cover $ 85 million in settlements last year, and this year will close 67 churches and recast 16 others as new parishes or worship sites without a full-time priest. Archbishop Sean O'Malley has said the crisis and the reconfiguration plan are "in no way" related. He cites demographic shifts, the priest shortage and aging, crumbling buildings too costly to keep up. Fargo, N. D. , which spent $ 821,000 on the abuse crisis, will close 23 parishes, but it's because the diocese is short of more than 50 priests for its 158 parishes, some with fewer than a dozen families attending Mass. They know how this ~eels in Milwaukee. That archdiocese shuttered about one in five parishes from 1995 to 2003. The city consolidations "gave some people who had been driving back into the city from new homes in the suburbs a chance to say they had no loyalty to a new parish and begin going to one near their home,' says Noreen Welte, director of parish planning for the Milwaukee Archdiocese. "It gave some people who already were mad at the church for one reason or another an excuse to stop going altogether. /

单选题British bosses' shamelessness is revealed in all the following facts Except______.

单选题Clever, rich or both -- almost every country in the world has some sort of programme to attract desirable migrants. The only exceptions are "weird places like Bhutan" says Christian Kalin of Henley & Partners, which specializes in fixing visas and passports for globe-trotters. Competition is fierce and, as with most things, that lowers the price and increases choice. Britain has two programmes, one for the rich -- who have to invest ￡ 750,000 ($1.36m) in actively traded securities -- and one, much larger, for talented foreigners. Both have worked well. Unlike some other countries, Britain does not make applicants find a job first: with good qualifications, they can just turn up and look for work. That helps keep Britain's economy flexible and competitive. But now a bureaucratic snag is threatening the scheme. The problem comes with anyone wanting to convert his visa into "indefinite leave to remain" (Britain's equivalent of America's Green Card). This normally requires four years' continuous residence in Britain. After a further year, it normally leads to British citizenship. The law defines continuous residence sensibly. Business trips and holidays don't count, if the applicant's main home is in Britain. As a rule of thumb, an average of 90 days abroad was allowed each year. But unpublished guidelines seen by The Economist are tougher: they say that "none of the absences abroad should be of more than three months, and they must not amount to more than six months in all." Over the four years needed to quality, that averages only six weeks a year. For many jet-setters, this restriction is a career-buster. Six weeks abroad barely covers holidays, let alone business travel. Alexei Sidney, a Russian consultant, has to turn down important jobs because he cannot afford any more days abroad. If applicants travel "too much", their children risk losing the right to remain in Britain. The Home Office insists that the rules have not changed since 2001. That would confirm Mr. Gherson's suspicion that the new policy has come in by accident, probably as a result of zeal or carelessness by mid-ranking officials. Their attitude is at odds with the stance of the government, which has been trying for years to make the system more user-friendly for the world's elite. It even moved processing of business residency cases from a huge office in Croydon, notorious for its slowness and hostility to would-be immigrants, to a new outfit in Sheffield. But lawyers such as Mr Kalin are in no doubt of the risk Britain is running. America, he says, is already losing out in the global talent market because of its "painful and humiliating" immigration procedures. If Britain's rules stay tight, he says, foreigners will go elsewhere. Likely beneficiaries are Ireland and Austria, European Union countries whose residency visas and passports confer the same convenience as British ones, with less hassle.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. 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{{U}} (1) {{/U}}each war through a new communications{{U}} (2) {{/U}}, from the early silent film of World War I to the 24-hour cable news{{U}} (3) {{/U}}of the first Persian Gulf War. Now,{{U}} (4) {{/U}}bombs exploding in Baghdad, a sudden increase in wartime{{U}} (5) {{/U}}for online news has become a central test of the{{U}} (6) {{/U}}of high-speed Internet connections. It is also a good{{U}} (7) {{/U}}both to attract users to online media{{U}} (8) {{/U}}and to persuade them to pay for the material they find there,{{U}} (9) {{/U}}the value of the Cable News Network persuaded millions to{{U}} (10) {{/U}}to cable during the last war in Iraq. {{U}} (11) {{/U}}by a steady rise over the last 18 months in the number of people with high-speed Internet{{U}} (12) {{/U}}, now at more than 70 million in the United States, the Web sites of many of the major news organizations have{{U}} (13) {{/U}}assembled a novel collage (拼贴) of{{U}} (14) {{/U}}video, audio reports, photography collections, animated weaponry{{U}} (15) {{/U}}, interactive maps and other new digital reportage. These Internet services are{{U}} (16) {{/U}}on the remarkable abundance of sounds and images{{U}} (17) {{/U}}from video cameras{{U}} (18) {{/U}}on Baghdad and journalists traveling with troops. And they have found a{{U}} (19) {{/U}}audience of American office workers{{U}} (20) {{/U}}their computers during the early combat. (245 words)

单选题 Millions of Americans and foreigners see GI.Joe as a mindless war toy, the symbol of American military adventurism, but that' s not how it used to be. To the men and women who{{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}in World War I1 and the people they liberated, the GI. was the{{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}man grown into hero, the pool farm kid torn away from his home, the guy who{{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}all the burdens of battle, who slept in cold foxholes, who went without the{{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}of 1hod and shelter, who stuck it out and drove back the Nazi reign of murder. This was not a vohmteer soldier, not someone well paid,{{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}an average guy, up{{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}the best trained, best equipped, fiercest, most brutal enemies seen in centuries. His name is not much. GI. is just a military abbreviation{{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}Govermnent Issue, and it was on all of the article{{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}to soldiers. And Joe? A common name for a guy who never{{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}it to the top. Joe Blow, Joe Magrae... a working class name.The United States has{{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}had a president or vieepresident or secretary of state Joe. GI. Joe had a{{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}career fighting Geman, Japanese, and Korean troops. He appears as a character, or a{{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}of American personalities, in the 1945 movie The Story of GL Joe, based on the last days of war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Some of the soldiers Pyle{{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}portrayde themselves in the fihn. Pyle was famous for covering the{{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}side of the warl, writing about the dirt-snow-and-mud soldiers, not how many miles were {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}or what towns were captured or liberated. His reports{{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}the "willie" cartoons of famed Stars and Stripes artist Bill Maulden. Both men{{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}the dirt and exhaustion of war, the{{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}of civilization that the soldiers shared with each other and the civilians: coffee, tobacco, whiskey, shelter, sleep.{{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}Egypt, France, and a dozen more countries, G. I. Joe was any American soldier,{{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}the most important person in their lives.

单选题 A bite of a cookie containing peanuts could cause the airway to constrict fatally. Sharing a toy with another child who had earlier eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich could raise a case of hives. A peanut butter cup dropped in a Halloween bag could contaminate the rest of the treats, posing an unknown risk. These are the scenarios that "make your bone marrow turn cold" according to L.Val Giddings, vice president for food and agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Besides representing the policy interests of food biotech companies in Washington, D. C. , Giddings is the father of a four-year-old boy with a severe peanut allergy. Peanuts are only one of the most allergenic foods; estimates of the number of people who experience a reaction to the beans hover around 2 percent of the population. Giddings says that peanuts are only one of several foods that biotechnologists are altering genetically in an attempt to eliminate the proteins that do great harm to some people's immune systems. Although soy allergies do not usually cause life-threatening reactions, the scientists are also targeting soybeans, which can be found in two thirds of all manufactured food, making the supermarket a minefield for people allergic to soy. Biotechnologists are focusing on wheat, too, and might soon expand their research to the rest of the "big eight" allergy-inducing foods: tree nuts, milk, eggs, shellfish and fish. Last September, for example, Anthony J.Kinney, a crop genetics researcher at DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Del., and his colleagues reported using a technique called RNA interference (RNAi) to silence the genes that encode p34, a protein responsible for causing 65 percent of all soybean allergies. RNAi exploits the mechanism that cells use to protect themselves against foreign genetic material; it causes a cell to destroy RNA transcribed from a given gene, effectively turning off the gene. Whether the public will accept food genetically modified to be low-allergen is still unknown. Courtney Chabot Dreyer, a spokesperson for Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a subsidiary of DuPont, says that the company will conduct studies to determine whether a promising market exists for low-allergen soy before developing the seeds for sale to farmers. She estimates that Pioneer Hi-Bred is seven years away from commercializing the altered soybeans. Doug Gurian-Sherman, scientific director of the biotechnology project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest-a group that has advocated enhanced Food and Drug Administration oversight for genetically modified foods-comments that his organization would not oppose low-allergen foods if they prove to be safe. But he wonders about "identity preservation" — a term used in the food industry to describe the deliberate separation of genetically engineered and nonengineered products. A batch of nonengineered peanuts or soybeans might contaminate machinery reserved for low-allergen versions, he suggests, reducing the benefit of the gene-altered food. Such issues of identity preservation could make low-allergen genetically modified foods too costly to produce, Chabot Dreyer admits. But, she says, "it's still too early to see if that's true."