单选题 The World Wide Web has been steadily creating a widespread surge in social capital through E-mail conversations, chat rooms, newsgroups, and e-zones. These ongoing connections are not an underground phenomenon, but a mainstream movement that is rapidly overwhelming traditional business models, according to the authors of another recent book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. "Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel towards being managed," writes co-author David Weinberger, a columnist and commentator on the Web’s effect on business. The Cluetrain Manifesto argues that knowledge workers are finding it intolerable that their employers require them to speak in artificial "business voices". The Web has become the ideal alternative: a public place where people can converse in their "authentic voices", outside of an organization’s official communications channel. Some of the social capital generated by these independent Web conversations is being used by its creators to circumvent the authority of corporations. For example, a car owner who thinks he was overcharged for service to his vehicle posts an inquiry to a newsgroup for people who own the same model of ear. Group members respond with their advice and personal experiences of getting their own cars serviced. The newsgroup is not owned or controlled by the car company. In fact, a mechanic employed by the car company participates in the conversation, offering his knowledge of what charges are reasonable and how company policies vary from dealer to dealer, and even suggesting which dealerships offer the best service. According to co-author Rick Levine, tile mechanic "was speaking for his company in a new way: honestly, openly, probably without his boss’s explicit sanction." In effect, an employee of the company independently joined a network of consumers to directly help satisfy a customer. "Companies need to harness this sort of caring and let itsviral enthusiasm be communicated in employees’ own voices," writes Levine, former Web Architect for Sun Microsystem’s Java Software group. As more and more people work online and form Web relationships, shared knowledge could become increasingly personal in cyberspace. Whether business joins in the conversations or not, it seems likely that this fast-growing strain of social capital will remain valuable for those who help to create it.

单选题Joy William's quirky fourth novel The Quick and the Dead follows three 16-year-old misfits in an abnormal Charlie's Angels set in the American south-west. Driven unclearly to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond curse: they rescue a wounded ox and hurl stones at stuffed elephants. In what is structurally a road novel that ends up where it began, the threesome stumbles upon both cruelty to animals and unlikely romance. A mournful dog is killed by an angry neighbor, a taxidermist falls in love with an 8-year-old direct-action firebrand determined that he pays. for his sins. A careen across the barely tamed Arizona prairie, this peculiar book aims less for a traditional storyline than a sequence of noisy (often hilarious) conversations, ridiculous circumstances, and absurdist scene. The consequent long-walk-to-nowhere is both the book's limitation and its charm. All three girls are motherless. Fiercely political Alice discovers that her parents are her grandparents, who thereupon shrivel: "Lie had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into oldness." Both parents of the sorrowful Corvus drowned while driving on a flooded interstate off-ramp. The mother of the more conventional Annabel ("one of those people who would say, We'll get in touch soonest' when they never wanted to see you again") slammed her car drunkenly into a fish restaurant. Later, Annabel's father observes to his wife's ghost. "You didn't want to order what I ordered, darling." The sharp-tongued ghost snaps back: "That's because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake." Against a roundly apocalyptic world view. the great pleasures of this book are line-by-line. Ms. Williams can break setting and character alike in a few slashes: "it was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but courageous downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave." Alice's acerbity spits little wisdoms: putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is "a classic capitalistic consumer trick, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror' and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy." Whether or not the novel, like Alice. expressly advocates animal rights, an animal motif crops up in every scene, as flesh-and-blood "critters" (usually dead) or plain decoration on crockery. If Ms. Williams does not intend to induce human horror at a pending cruel Armageddon, she at least invokes a future of earthly loneliness, where animals appear only as ceramic-hen butter dishes and extinct-species Elastoplasts. One caution: when flimsy narrative superstructure begins to sag, anarchic wackiness can grow wearing. While The Quick and the Dead is sharp from its first page, the trouble with starting at the edge is there is nowhere to go. Nevertheless. Ms. Williams is original, energetic and viscously funny: Carl Hiaasen with a conscience.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The haunting paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, on show in the final leg of a travelling tour that has already attracted thousands of visitors in Hamburg and The Hague, may come as a surprise to many. Few outside the Nordic world would recognise the work of this Finnish artist who died in 1946． More people should. The 120 works have at their core 20 self-portraits, half the number she painted in all. The first, dated 1880, is of a wide-eyed teenager eager to absorb everything. The last is a sighting of the artist's ghost-to-be; Schjerfbeck died the year after it was made. Together this series is among the most moving and accomplished autobiographies-in-paint. Precociously gifted, Schjerfbeck was 11 when she entered the Finnish Art Society's drawing school. "The Wounded Warrior in the Snow", a history painting, was bought by a private collector and won her a state travel grant when she was 17．Schjerfbeck studied in Paris, went on to Pont-Aven, Brittany, where she painted for a year, then to Tuscany, Cornwall and St Petersburg. During her 1887 visit to St Ives, Cornwall, Schjerfbeck painted "The Convalescent". A child wrapped in a blanket sits propped up in a large wicker chair, toying with a sprig. The picture won a bronze medal at the 1889 Paris World Fair and was bought by the Finnish Art Society. To a modern eye it seems almost sentimental and is redeemed only by the somewhat stunned, melancholy expression on the child's face, which may have been inspired by Schjerfbeck's early experiences. At four, she fell down a flight of steps and never fully recovered. In 1890, Schjerfbeck settled in Finland. Teaching exhausted her, she did not like the work of other local painters, and she was further isolated when she took on the care of her mother (who lived until 1923). "If I allow myself the freedom to live a secluded life", she wrote, "then it is because it has to be that way. " In 1902, Scherfbeck and her mother settled in the small, industrial town of Hyvinkaa, 50 kilometers north of Hetsinki. Isolation had one desired effect for it was there that Schjerfbeck became a modern painter. She produced still lives and landscapes but above all moody yet incisive portraits of her mother, local school girls, women workers in town (profiles of a pensive, aristocratic looking seamstress dressed in black stand out ). And of course she painted herself. Comparisons have been made with James McNeill Whistler and Edvard Munch. But from 1905, her pictures became pure Schjerfbeck. "I have always searched for the dense depths of the soul, that have not yet discovered themselves", she wrote, "where everything is still unconscious-there one can make the greatest discoveries. " She experimented with different kinds of underpainting, scraped and rubbed, made bright rosy red spots; doing whatever had to be done to capture the subconscious-her own and that of her models. In 1913, Schjerfbeck was rediscovered by an art dealer and journalist, Gosta Stenman. Once again she was a success. Retrospectives, touring exhibitions and a biography followed, yet Schjerfbeck remained little known outside Scandinavia. Th_at may have had something to do with her indifference to her renown. "I am nothing, absolutely nothing", she wrote. "All I want to do is paint". Schjerfbeck was possessed of a unique vision, and it is time the world recognised that.

单选题A father's relationship to his child's current and future academic success and the level of his or her development in academic potential and scholastic achievement are both factors with some rather interesting implications that educators are beginning to study and appraise. As a matter of fact, "life with father", has been discovered to be a very important factor in determining a child's progress or lack of progress in school. A recent survey of over 16,000' children made by the National Child Development Study in London, England, revealed that children whose fathers came to school conferences and accompanied their children on outings did measurably better in school than did those children x, hose fathers were not involved in these activities. The study, which monitored children born during a weekMarch, 1958, from the time of their birth through the years of their early schooling, further revealed that the children of actively involved fathers scored as much as seven months higher in reading and maths than did those children whose only involved parent was the mother. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the role played by fathers in the raising of a child. It indicated a much higher level of parental involvement by the father than had beenanticipated. Over 66% of the fathers were said to have played a major role in parentalresponsibility. The study also suggested that the greatest level of parental parenting took place in thefamilies of only children. As the number of children and financial obligations increased, the father's apparent interest and involvement with thechildren decreased. Hlowever, no matter what the size of financial condition of the family, a father's active participation in the child'sdevelopment made great difference in the children's progress. The study further revealed that while the frequency of overnight absences reflected a corresponding deficiency of the child's level in maths and reading, a father's employment on late shifts appeared to have little effect on the child's academic progress. The data from the study was obtained primarily through interviews with parents, teachers and physicians. The information evaluating the level of the father's parenting performance was elicited primarily fromtheadmittedly subjective observations of their wives.

单选题A scientist who does research in economic psychology and who wants to predict the way in which consumers will spend their money must study consumer behavior. He must obtain (1) both on resources of consumers and on the motives that (2) to encourage or discourage money spending. If an (3) were asked which of three groups borrow most -- people with rising incomes, (4) incomes, or declining incomes -- he would (5) answer: those with declining incomes. Actually, in the years 1997 -2000, the answer was: people with rising incomes. People with declining incomes were next and people with stable incomes borrowed the (6) . This shows us that tradition- al (7) about earning and spending are not always (8) Another traditional assumption is that if people who have money expect prices to go up, they will (9) to buy. If they expect prices to go down, they will postpone buying. (10) research surveys have shown that this is not always (11) The expectations of price increases may not stimulate buying. One (12) attitude was ex- pressed by the wife of a mechanic in an interview at a time of rising prices. Her family had been planning to buy a new car but they postponed this purchase. (13) , the rise in prices that has al- ready taken place may be resented and buyer's resistance may be evoked. The (14) mentioned above was carried out in America. Investigations (15) at the same time in Great Britain, however, yielded results that were more (16) traditional assumptions about saving and spending patterns. The condition most contributive to spending (17) to be price stability. If prices have been stable and people consider that they are (18) , they are likely to buy. Thus, it appears that the common (19) policy of maintaining stable prices is based on a correct understanding of (20) psychology.

单选题In most parts of the world, climate change is a worrying subject. Not so in California. At a recent gathering of green luminaries—in a film star's house, naturally, for that is how seriousness is often established in Los Angeles—the dominant note was self-satisfaction at what the state has already achieved. And perhaps nobody is more complacent than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unlike A1 Gore, a presidential candidate turned prophet of environmental doom, California's governor sounds cheerful when talking about climate change. As well he might: it has made his political career. Although California has long been an environmentally-conscious state, until recently greens were concerned above all with smog and redwood trees. "Coast of Dreams", Kevin Stag's authoritative history of contemporary California, published in 2004, does not mention climate change. In that year, though, the newly-elected Mr. Schwarzenegger made his first tentative call for western states to seek alternatives to fossil fuels. Gradually he noticed that his efforts to tackle climate change met with less resistance, and more acclaim, than just about all his other policies. These days it can seem as though he works on nothing else. Mr. Schwarzenegger's transformation from screen warrior to eco-warrior was completed last year when he signed a bill imposing legally-enforceable limits on greenhouse—gas emissions—a first for America. Thanks mostly to its lack of coal and heavy industry, California is a relatively clean state. If it were a country it would be the world's eighth-biggest economy, but only its 16th-biggest polluter. Its big problem is transport—meaning, mostly, cars and trucks, which account for more than 40% of its greenhouse-gas emissions compared with 32% in America as a whole. The state wants to ratchet down emissions limits on new vehicles, beginning in 2009. Mr. Schwarzenegger has also ordered that, by 2020, vehicle fuel must produce 10% less carbon: in the production as well as the burning, so a simple switch to corn-based ethanol is probably out. Thanks in part to California' s example, most of the western states have adopted climate action plans. When it comes to setting emission targets, the scene can resemble a posedown at a Mr. Olympia contest. Arizona's climate-change scholars decided to set a target of cutting the state's emissions to 2000 levels by 2020. But Janet Napolitano, the governor, was determined not to be out-muscled by California. She has declared that Arizona will try to return to 2000 emission levels by 2012. California has not just inspired other states; it has created a vanguard that ought to be able to prod the federal government into stronger national standards than it would otherwise consider. But California is finding it easier to export its policies than to put them into practice at home. In one way, California' s self-confidence is fully justified. It has done more than any other state—let alone the federal government—to fix America's attention on climate change. It has also made it seem as though the problem can be solved. Which is why failure would be such bad news. At the moment California is a beacon to other states. If it fails, it will become an excuse for inaction.

单选题Every code of etiquette has contained three elements.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} SoBig. F was the more visible of the two recent waves of infection because it propagated itself by e-mail, meaning that victims noticed what was going on. SoBig. F was so effective that it caused substantial disruption even to those protected by anti-virus software. That was because so many copies of the virus spread (some 500,000 computers were infected) that many machines were overwhelmed by messages from their own anti-virus software. On top of that, one common counter-measure backfired, increasing traffic still further. Anti-virus software often bounces a warning back to the sender of an infected e-mail, saying that the e-mail in question cannot be delivered because it contains a virus. SoBig. F was able to spoof this system by "harvesting" e-mail addresses from the hard disks of infected computers. Some of these addresses were then sent infected e-mails that had been doctored to look as though they had come from other harvested addresses. The latter were thus sent warnings, even though their machines may not have been infected. Kevin Haley of Symantec, a firm that makes anti-virus software, thinks that one reason SoBig. F was so much more effective than other viruses that work this way is because it was better at searching hard drives for addresses. Brian King, of CERT, an internet-security centre at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, notes that, unlike its precursors, SoBig. F was capable of "multi-threading", it could send multiple e-mails simultaneously, allowing it to dispatch thousands in minutes. Blaster worked by creating a "buffer overrun in the remote procedure call". In English, that means it attacked a piece of software used by Microsoft's Windows operating system to allow one computer to control another. It did so by causing that software to use too much memory. Most worms work by exploiting weaknesses in an operating system, but whoever wrote Blaster had a particularly refined sense of humour, since the website under attack was the one from which users could obtain a program to fix the very weakness in Windows that the worm itself was exploiting. One Way to deal with a wicked worm like Blaster is to design a fairy godmother worm that goes around repairing vulnerable machines automatically. In the case of Blaster someone seems to have tried exactly that with a program called Welchi. However, according to Mr. Haley, Welchi has caused almost as many problems as Blaster itself, by overwhelming networks with "pings" signals that checked for the presence of other computers. Though both of these programs fell short of the apparent objectives of their authors, they still caused damage. For instance, they forced the shutdown of a number of computer networks, including the one used by the New York Times newsroom, and the one organising trains operated by CSX, a freight company on America's east coast. Computer scientists expect that it is only a matter of time before a truly devastating virus is unleashed.

单选题Is the literary critic like the poet, responding creatively, intuitively, subjectively to the written word as the poet responds to human experience? Or is the critic more like a scientist, following a series of demonstrable, verifiable steps, using an objective method of analysis? For the woman who is a practitioner of feminist literary criticism, the subjectivity versus objectivity, or critic-as-artist-or-scientist, debate has special significance; for her, the question is not only academic, but political as well, and her definition will provoke special risks whichever side of the issue it favors. If she defines feminist criticism as objective and scientific--a valid, verifiable, intellectual method that anyone, whether man or woman, can perform--the definition not only makes the critic-as-artist approach impossible, but may also hinder accomplishment of the utilitarian political objectives of those who seek to change the academic establishment and its thinking, especially about sex roles. If she defines feminist criticism as creative and intuitive, privileged as art, then her work becomes vulnerable to the prejudices of stereotypic ideas about the ways in which women think, and will be dismissed by much of the academic establishment. Because of these prejudices, women who use an intuitive approach in their criticism may find themselves charged with inability to be analytical, to be objective, or to think critically. Whereas men may be free to claim the role of critic-as-artist, women run different professional risks when they choose intuition and private experience as critical method and defense. These questions are political in the sense that the debate over them will inevitably be less an exploration of abstract matters in a spirit of disinterested inquiry than an academic power struggle, in which the careers and professional fortunes of many women scholars only now entering the academic profession in substantial numbers will be at stake, and with them the chances for a distinctive contribution to humanistic understanding, a contribution that might be an important influence against sexism in our society. As long as the academic establishment continues to regard objective analysis as "masculine" and an intuitive approach as "feminine," the theoretician must steer a delicate philosophical course between the two. If she wishes to construct a theory of feminist criticism, she would be well advised to place it within the framework of a general theory of the critical process that is neither purely objective nor purely intuitive. Her theory is then more likely to be compared and contrasted with other theories of criticism with some degree of dispassionate distance. (418 words)

单选题The author's attitude toward FCC's new rules seems to be

单选题The Scottish countryside will soon be home to creatures which is strange to Britain. This spring, 17 beavers (海狸) will be released into a remote area of rivers and forests. Hunted to extinction throughout Europe, beavers haven"t roamed Britain"s wilderness for almost 500 years. Ecologists would like to invite back other long-lost species to help restore the natural balance. To save the country"s plants from deer, which have doubled to 2 million since the start of this decade, an Oxford University biologist late last year called for reintroducing the lynx (猞猁)—a wildcat that died out in Britain 1,300 years ago. Nature has long been a popular cause in Europe. British people love their countryside of fences and fields, the French their vineyards (葡萄园) and the Germans their hiking forests. But in recent years conservationists have set their sights on the more distant past, when Europe"s forests and meadows were full of elephants, hippo-potamuses (河马), rhinoceroses(犀牛) and big cats. Some ambitious conservationists are now advocating a return to norms of wilderness that date back to 11,000 years ago when the biggest mammals were at the top of the food chain. Nobody is advocating allowing elephants and lions to run crazily in this densely populated region. But wilding supporters would give free control to a long list of lesser mammals, including the beaver and the lynx, which some people fear could be destructive. Some landowners withdraw at the thought of beavers cutting down trees with their teeth and flooding their property; the Scottish Parliament rejected several earlier efforts to reintroduce the mammal. Proposals to set loose wolves and bears in Britain have also encountered resistance. Although rhinos and hippos thrived in Europe thousands of years ago, no one is sure what effect they would have on ecosystems now. "The idea of bringing back big mammals is interesting, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts, there"s a lot of questions," say some biologists. For example, elephants could destroy what little forest and grassland Europe has left. The beavers of Tierra del Fuego provide a cautionary tale. When a failed commercial fur farm released its few remaining beavers into the wild 60 years ago, the population exploded, and they are still revenging the local people. Is this Britain"s future? Supporters say no, the beaver will fit right in. Destroying nature is not a job for the mild.