单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Most firms' annual general meetings (AGMs) owe more to North Korea than ancient Greece. By long-standing tradition, bosses make platitudinous speeches, listen to lone dissidents with the air of psychiatric nurses towards patients and wait for their own proposals to be rubber-stamped by the proxy votes of obedient institutional investors. According to Manifest, a shareholder-advice firm, 97% of votes cast across Europe last year backed management. So should corporate democrats be cheered by the rebellion over pay at Royal Dutch Shell? At the oil giant's AGM on May 19th, 59% of voting shareholders sided against pay packages for top executives. In particular they disliked 4.2 million ($ 5.8 million) in shares dished out to five executives, which comprised about 12% of their total pay for 2008．Under the firm's rules, such awards should be granted only if Shell's total return in the year is in the top three of its peer group. In 2007 and 2008, Shell came a very close fourth, so the firm decided to pay out anyway. Shell is hardly a poster child for malfeasance: it is performing well, its pay is similar to that at other big oil firms and its shareholders previously gave directors discretion to bend the rules. They have used it to cut pay in the past. Still, although the vote is not binding, it is seriously embarrassing. The turnout was decent, at about 50%, and several big fund managers were clearly furious. The payouts have already been made and probably cannot be reversed, but Shell will be in disgrace for a while. Jorma Ollila, its chairman, said he took the vote "very seriously" and promised to "reflect carefully". After GSK, a British drugs firm, had a rebellion on pay in 2003, it completely redrew its pay policy. It is not just Shell that is facing unrest. Rough markets and a wider political uproar over pay have fuelled discontent across corporate Europe. Almost half of the voting shareholders at BP, another oil giant, failed to support its pay policies in April. At Rio Tinto, a mining firm with a habit of digging holes for itself, a fifth of voting shareholders rejected its remuneration policy. So far this year 15% of votes cast on pay in Britain have dissented, compared with 7% last year. In continental Europe owners are grumpy, too: in February almost a third of voting shareholders at Novartis, a Swiss drugs firm, demanded the right to approve its remuneration policy each year. But taking bosses to task for their ever-escalating salaries is not a substitute for keen oversight of performance and strategy. At Royal Bank of Scotland, which had to be rescued by taxpayers last year, 90% of voting shareholders rejected its pay policies last month. Yet back in August 2007, 95% of them ticked the box in support of the acquisition of ABN AMRO, the deal that brought the bank to its knees.

单选题The author believes that our knowledge of social systems is more secure than that of physical systems because ______.

单选题Much of the American anxiety about old age is a flight from the reality of death. One of the striking qualities of the American character is the unwillingness to face either the fact or meaning of death. In the more somber tradition of American literature-from Hawthorne and Melville and Poe to Faulkner and Hemingway—one finds a tragic depth that belies the surface thinness of the ordinary American death attitudes. By an effort of the imagination, the great writers faced problems that the culture in action is reluctant to face—the fact of death, its mystery, and its place in. the back-and-forth shuttling of the eternal recurrence. The unblinking confrontation of death in Greek time, the elaborate theological patterns woven around it in the Middle Ages, the ritual celebration of it in the rich, peasant cultures of Latin and Slavic Europe and in primitive cultures; these are difficult to find in American life. Whether through fear of the emotional depths, or because of a drying up of the sluices of religious intensity, the American avoids dwelling on death or even corning to terms with it; he finds it morbid and recoils from it, surrounding it with word avoidance (Americans never die; they "pass away,") and various taboos of speech and practice. A "funeral parlor" is decorated to look like a bank; everything in a funeral ceremony is done in hushed tones, as if it were something furtive, to be concealed from the world; there is so much emphasis on being dignified that the ceremony often loses its quality of dignity. In some of the primitive cultures, there is difficulty in understanding the muses of death; it seems puzzling and even unintelligible. Living in a scientific culture, Americans have a ready enough explanation of how it comes, yet they show little capacity to come to terms with the fact of death itself and with the grief that accompanies it. "We jubilate over birth and dance at weddings", writes Margaret Mead, "but more and more hustle the death off the scene without ceremony, without an opportunity for young and old to realize that death is as much a fact of life as is birth". And one may add, even in its hurry and brevity, the last stage of an American' s life—the last occasion of this relation to his society—is as standardized as the rest.

单选题From para. 7 we may draw the conclusion that______.

单选题When, in the age of automation, man searches for a worker to do the tedious, unpleasant jobs that are more or less impossible to mechanize, he may very profitably consider the ape. If we tackled the problem of breeding for brains with as much enthusiasm as we devote to breeding dogs of surrealistic shapes, we could eventually produce assorted models of useful primates, ranging in size from the gorilla down to the baboon, each adapted to a special kind of work. It is not putting too much strain on the imagination to assume that geneticists could produce a super-ape, which is able to understand some scores of words and capable of being trained for such jobs as picking fruit, cleaning up the litter in parks, shining shoes, collecting garbage, doing household chores and even baby-sitting, although I have known some babies I would not care to trust with a valuable ape. Apes could do many jobs, such as cleaning streets and the more repetitive types of agricultural work, without supervision, though they might need protection from those egregious specimens of Home sapiens who think it amusing to tease or bully anything they consider lower on the evolutionary ladder. For other tasks, such as delivering papers and laboring on the docks, our man-ape would have to work under human overseers; and, incidentally, I would love to see the finale of the twenty-first century version of On the Waterfront in which the honest but hairy hero will drum on his chest after—literally—taking the wicked labor leader apart. Once a supply of nonhuman workers becomes available, a whole range of low IQ jobs could be thankfully given up by mankind, to its great mental and physical advantage. What is more, one of the problems which has annoyed so many fictional Utopias would be avoided: There would be none of the degradingly subhuman Epsilons of Huxley's Brave New World to act as a permanent reproach to society, for there is a profound moral difference between breeding sub-men and super-apes, though the end products are much the same. The first would introduce a form of slavery, but the second would be a biological triumph which could benefit both men and animals.Notes: surrealistic 超现实的。primate 灵长类动物。 gorilla 大猩猩。 baboon 狒狒。chore 杂活。 care to do sth. (常用于否定句)( =willing to do or agree to do sth. ) 愿意做某事。trust A with B把B 托付给A. egregious (通常指坏人或坏事) 异乎寻常的，突出的。Home sapiens 人类。finale n. 结局。 Epsilons 奴隶人名。assorted 各色各样的。Utopia 乌托邦，理想主义。

单选题In recent years, Microsoft has focused on three big tasks: building robust security into its software, resolving numerous antitrust complaints against it and upgrading its Windows operating system. These three tasks are now starting to collide. On August 27th the firm said that the successor to its Windows XP operating system, code-named Longhorn, will go on sale in 2007 without one of its most impressive features, a technique to integrate elaborate search capabilities into nearly all desktop applications. (On the bright side, Longhorn will contain advances in rendering images and enabling different computing platforms to exchange data directly between applications. ) It is a big setback for Microsoft, which considers search technology a pillar of its future growth -not least as it competes against Google. The firm's focus on security championed by Bill Gates himself--took resources away from Longhorn, admits Greg Sullivan, a lead product manager in the Windows client division. Programmers have been fixing Windows XP rather than working on Longhorn. In mid- August, Microsoft released Service Pack 2, a huge set of free software patches and enhancements to make Windows XP more secure. Though some of the fixes turned out to have vulnerabilities of their own, the patches have mostly been welcomed. Microsoft's decision to forgo new features in return for better security is one that most computer users will probably applaud. Yet ironically, as Microsoft slowly improves the security of its products---by, for instance, incorporating firewall technology, anti-virus systems and spam filters its actions increasingly start to resemble those that, in the past, have got the firm into trouble with regulators. Is security software an "adjacent software market", in which case Microsoft may be leveraging its dominance of the operating system into it? Integrating security products into Windows might be considered "bundling" which, with regard to web browsing, so excited America's trustbusters in the 1990s. And building security directly into the operating system seems a lot like "commingling" software code, on which basis the European Commission ruled earlier this year that Microsoft abused its market power through the Windows Media Player. Microsoft is appealing against that decision, and on September 30th it will argue for a suspension of the commission's remedies, such as the requirement that it license its code to rivals. Just last month, the European Union's competition directorate began an investigation into Microsoft and Time Warner, a large media firm, on the grounds that their proposed joint acquisition of ContentGuard, a software firm whose products protect digital media files, might provide Microsoft with, undue market power over digital media standards. The commission will rule by January 2005. Microsoft, it seems, in security as elsewhere, is going to have to get used to being punished for its success. Its Windows monopoly lets it enjoy excessive profits but the resulting monoculture makes it an obvious target for viruses and regulators alike.

单选题When a disease of epidemic proportions rips into the populace, scientists immediately get to work, trying to locate the source of the affliction and find ways to combat it. Oftentimes, success is achieved, as medical science is able to isolate the parasite, germ or cell that causes the problem and finds ways to effectively kill or contain it. In the most serious of cases, in which the entire population of a region or country may be at grave risk, it is deemed necessary to protect the entire population through vaccination, so as to safeguard lives and ensure that the disease will not spread. The process of vaccination allows the patient's body to develop immunity to the virus or disease so that, if it is encountered, one can ward it off naturally. To accomplish this, a small weak or dead strain of the disease is actually injected into the patient in a controlled environment, so that his body's immune system can learn to fight the invader properly. Information on how to penetrate the disease's defenses is transmitted to all elements of the patient's immune system in a process that occurs naturally, in which genetic information is passed from cell to cell. This makes sure that, should the patient later come into contact with the real problem, his body is well equipped and trained to deal with it, having already done so before. There are dangers inherent in the process, however. On occasion, even the weakened version of the disease contained in the vaccine proves too much for the body to handle, resulting in the immune system succumbing, and, therefore, the patient's death. Such is the case of the smallpox vaccine, designed to eradicate the smallpox epidemic that nearly wiped out the entire Native American population and killed massive numbers of settlers. Approximately 1 in 10,000 people who receives the vaccine contract the smallpox disease from the vaccine itself and dies from it. Thus, if the entire population of the United States were to receive the Smallpox Vaccine today, 3000 Americans would be left dead. Fortunately, the smallpox virus was considered eradicated in the early 1970's, ending the mandatory vaccination of all babies in America. In the event of a reintroduction of the disease, however, mandatory vaccinations may resume, resulting in more unexpected deaths from vaccination. The process, which is truly a mixed blessing, may indeed hide some hidden curses.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Despite the doubts, and despite complaints from shop owners, London's congestion charge --introduced in February 2003 -- has managed to ease the gridlock in the city centre. Traffic is down by 18%, jams by 30%. The scheme's biggest weakness is that it is crude: drivers pay ￡ 8 ($14) to enter the zone between 7am and 6:30pm, regardless of how congested the roads are, or how long they stay. So road-pricing fans are watching trials by Transport for London (TfL) of a new detection system, called tag-and-beacon, with interest. Under such a scheme (used in Singapore and on some European roads) cars are fitted with electronic tags that are read by roadside masts. If the trial is successful, TfL says that the city could switch to the system once the contract to run the congestion charge is re-let in 2009. Currently, cameras are used to read license plates and track motorists. They are not always reliable: an individual camera identifies only around 70% of cars. Most driven get photographed more than once, which boosts the system's effectiveness to over 95%, but that still leaves several thousand vehicles per day whose details must be laboriously checked by hand. Tag-and-beacon technology is much more accurate, with an identification rate of over 99%. TfL says the trial is partly designed to see whether the new system could allow drivers to pay charges by direct debit. That would be popular with motorists, who complain that the current payment system is unfriendly: the toll for a day' s travel must be paid manually -- online, by phone or in a shop -- by midnight, with steep fines levied on forgetful drivers. More precise detection also allows for more precision in policy, and road-pricing enthusiasts see radical possibilities ahead. TfL says it is considering using the new technology to charge drivers each time they cross the zone boundary (up to a daily maximum), instead of paying once for an entire day's travel. That would be cheaper for drivers who make few trips into the zone, although drivers who spend a long time trundling around without leaving (thereby causing the most congestion) would get off lightly, too. Further refinements may be possible. The current system has cut traffic most drastically in the middle of the day, when congestion is at its lowest. Demand for road space would better match supply if charges were variable -- high at the busiest times of day and low in quiet periods. Such a time-sensitive, variable-charging scheme using a tag-and-beacon system was endorsed last year by Bob Kiley, the TfL's boss, who also said that he wanted to extend the congestion charge to other parts of London. That would be controversial, and Mr. Kiley's underlings were quick to insist that his musings were not official policy. But the original scheme was controversial too, yet Ken Livingstone, London's mayor and its biggest backer, was re-elected after introducing it. It would be a shame if timidity took hold now.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} House-price falls are gathering momentum and are spreading across the UK, according to a monthly poll of surveyors which on Monday delivered its gloomiest reading for nearly 12 years. Fifty-six per cent of surveyors contacted by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors reported price falls in the three months to October. Only 3 per cent saw prices rise in their area, compared with 58 per cent as recently as May. There was further evidence of slowing activity in the property market as the number of sales per surveyor dived to a nine-year low. Unsold stock on agents' books has increased 10 per cent since the summer. Ian Perry, Rics' national housing spokesman, said it was now very clear that buyers were unsettled by higher interest rates. The Bank of England raised rates five times to 4. 75 per cent over the last year to cool the property boom. But he also blamed comments by Mervyn King, the Bank's governor, and misleading media headlines for "injecting additional uncertainty into the market by continued speculation over more serious price declines". "Mervyn King presumably felt that he had to be more explicit in the summer when people were still buying. His warnings of a drop in property prices then have had the desired effect. "But our concern now is that {{U}}the pendulum is swinging too far,{{/U}}" be said. Last week, the Bank's monetary policy committee predicted for the first time that "house prices may fall modestly for a period" in its November inflation report. The Nationwide and Halifax mortgage lenders both showed a modest monthly decline in house prices in their latest loan approval data. Although the majority of surveyors expect prices to fall further in the next three months, Mr. Perry stressed there were signs of stabilizing demand from buyers in London. "London tends to be ahead of the rest of the market. And agents are telling us that more people are looking to buy. It is much better than it was," Mr. Perry said. However, falling prices continued to spread from the South of England as surveyors reported the first clear decline in prices in Yorkshire and the Humber, the north and the north west. Scotland remained the only region with rising prices.

单选题In the eyes of Green, United Airlines

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} This past academic year, 146 New York City kids from 4 to 14 dutifully attended Rosalyn Chao's Mandarin class at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral Academy. Many of the students were first-generation Americans; for several, Mandarin would be their third language, after English and Spanish. Get used to this picture; around the world, more adults and kids are learning Chinese. Beijing is pouring money into new Confucius Institutes (Chinese language and culture centers), and two U.S. senators recently proposed spending $1.3 billion on Chinese-language programs over the next five years. From Ulan Bator to Chicago, it sometimes seems as if everyone is trying to learn the language now spoken by a fifth of the world's population. Their reasoning is easy to understand. China is booming, and citizens around the globe want a piece of the action. Speaking Mandarin can facilitate communication with newly wealthy Chinese tourists or smooth bilateral trade relations. In a form of intense cultural diplomacy, Beijing is also promoting its films, music, art and language as never before. Front and center are the Confucius Institutes, modeled on the British Council, Germany's Goethe Institutes or the Alliance Francaise. China's Ministry of Education is sending thousands of language instructors to foreign programs and inviting foreign students from Asia, Africa and elsewhere to study in its universities. As a result, Beijing predicts that 100 million individuals will be studying Mandarin as a second language by the end of the decade. The U.S. Department of Education announced earlier this year that it hopes to have 5 percent of all elementary, secondary and college students enrolled in Mandarin studies by 2010. The Chinese boom hasn't escaped criticism, however. For one thing, the language is hard, with more than 2,500 characters generally employed in daily writing and a complex tonal speaking system. Then there's the danger that other important languages, such as Russian or Japanese, will be neglected; for example, there are now 10 times more students learning Mandarin than Japanese in the United States. And other countries fear a growing encroachment(侵蚀) of Chinese power; some Africans have complained about Beijing's "neocolonialist(新殖民主义)" attitudes, for example, and this could breed resentment against Confucius Institutes on their soil. Yet most Mandarin students, like those at St. Pat's, aren't letting such concerns dissuade them. Mandarin represents a new way of thinking. Chao says that" we must begin preparing our students for the interconnected world." Accordingly, she has encouraged her Mandarin students to correspond with pen pals in Shanghai. Chao says that" in reading the Chinese students' letters, we learned quickly that American students are far behind their Asian counterparts." If they hope to catch up to their Chinese competitors, her students--like the growing legions of Mandarin pupils around the globe -- are going to have to study hard indeed.

单选题The small size of the components of computer chips has proved unstoppable. In each new (1) , those components are smaller and more tightly packed than they were in their predecessor. (2) has been so rapid that chip designers are (3) apparently fundamental barriers to further reductions in size and increases in density. In a small size version of the (4) to wireless communication in the macroscopic world, a group of researchers led by Alain Nogaret, think they can make chips (5) components talk to each other wirelessly. The researchers (6) to use the standard print techniques employed in chipmaking to coat a semiconductor with tiny magnets. These magnets will (7) local magnetic fields that point in opposite directions at different points (8) the chip's surface. Electrons have a (9) called spin--that is affected by magnetic fields, and the team hopes to use a/an (10) called inverse electron-spin vibration to make electrons (11) the chip emit microwaves. Dr. Nogaret imagine great advances that would stem (12) the success of his work, and these are not (13) to the possibility of packing components yet more tightly. In today's chips, the failure of a single connection can put the whole circuit out of (14) . This should not happen with a wireless system (15) it could be programmed to re-route signals. The project will not be (16) sailing. Generating microwaves powerful enough to (17) data reliably will (18) involve stacking several layers of magnets and semiconductors together and encouraging the electrons in them to move in a harmonious union. But if it (19) , a whole new wireless world will be (20) .

单选题What does the word "a fish" (Para. 1) probably refer to?

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B,C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Imagine being asked to spend twelve or so years of your life in a society which consisted only of members of your own sex. How would you react? Unless there was something definitely wrong with you, you wouldn't be too happy about it, to say the least. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that so many parents in the world choose to impose such abnormal conditions on their children--conditions which they themselves wouldn't put up with for one minute! Any discussion of this topic is bound to question the aims of education. Stuffing children's heads full of knowledge is far from being foremost among them. One of the chief aims of education is to equip future citizens with all they require to take their place in adult society. Now adult society is made up of men and women, so how can a segregated school possibly offer the right sort of preparation for it? Anyone entering adult society after years of segregation can only be in for a shock. A co-educational school offers children nothing less than a true version of society in miniature. Boys and girls are given the opportunity to get to know each other, to learn to live together from their earliest years. They are put in a position where they can compare themselves with each other in terms of academic ability, athletic achievement and many of the extra-curricular activities which are part of school life. What a practical advantage it is (to give just a small example) to be able to put on a school play in which the male parts will be taken by boys and the female parts by girls! What nonsense, boys and girls are made to feel that they are a race apart. Rivalry between the sexes is fostered. In a co-educational school, everything falls into its proper place. But perhaps the greatest contribution of co-education is the healthy attitude to life it encourages. Boys don't grow up believing that women are mysterious creatures—airy goddesses, more like book-illustrations to a fairy-tale, than human beings. Girls don't grow up imagining that men axe romantic heroes. Years of living together at school dispel illusions of this kind. There axe no goddesses with freckles, pigtails, piercing voices and inky fingers. There are no romantic heroes with knobby knees, dirty fingernails and unkempt hair. The awkward stage of adolescence brings into sharp focus some of the physical and emotional problems involved in growing up. These can better be overcome in a coeducational environment. Segregated schools sometimes provide the right conditions for sexual deviation. This is hardly possible under a co-educational system. When the time comes for the pupils to leave school, they are fully prepared to enter society as well-adjusted adults. They have already had years of experience in coping with many of the problems that face men and women.