单选题 Texting has long been lamented as the downfall of the written word, {{U}}"penmanship for illiterates,"{{/U}} one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL. Texting properly isn't writing at all-it's actually more akin to spoken language. And it's a "spoken" language that is getting richer and more complex by the year. Historically, talking came first; writing is just an artifice that came along later. While talk is largely subconscious and rapid, writing is deliberate and slow. Over time, writers took advantage of this and started crafting sentences such as this one, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The whole engagement lasted above 12 hours, till the gradual retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself. " No one talks like that casually-or should. But it is natural to desire to do so for special occasions. In the old days, we didn't much write like talking because there was no mechanism to reproduce the speed of conversation. But texting and instant messaging do-and a revolution has begun. It involves the brute mechanics of writing, but in its economy, spontaneity and even vulgarity, texting is actually a new kind of talking. There is a virtual cult of concision and little interest in capitalization or punctuation. The argument that texting is "poor writing" is analogous, then, to one that the Rolling Stones is "bad music" because it doesn't use violas. Texting is developing its own kind of grammar. Take LOL. It doesn't actually mean "laughing out loud" in a literal sense anymore. LOL has evolved into something much subtler and sophisticated and is used even when nothing is remotely amusing. Jocelyn texts "Where have you been?" and Annabelle texts back "LOL at the library studying for two hours." LOL signals basic empathy between texters, easing tension and creating a sense of equality. Instead of having a literal meaning, it does something— conveying an attitude—just like the -ed ending conveys past tense rather than "meaning" anything. LOL, of all things, is grammar. Civilization is fine—people banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use .in actual writing, and there is no evidence that texting is ruining composition skills. Worldwide people speak differently from the way they write, and texting-quick, casual and only intended to be read once—is actually a way of talking with your fingers.

单选题The text is mainly

单选题It is suggested in the third paragraph that ______.

单选题Remember Second Life, the virtual world that was supposed to become almost as important as the first one? Now populated by no more than 84,000 avatars at a time, it has turned out to be a prime example of how short-lived Internet fads can be. Yet if many adults seem to have given up on virtual worlds, those that cater to children and teenagers are thriving. Several have even found a way to make money. In America, nearly 10 million children and teenagers visit virtual worlds regularly, estimates eMarketer, a market researcher-a number the firm expects to increase to 15 million by 2013．As in January, there were 112 virtual worlds designed for under-18s with another 81 in development, according to Engage Digital Media, a market research firm. All cater to different age groups and tastes. In Club Penguin, the market leader, which was bought by Disney in 2007 for a whopping $ 700 million, primary-school children can take on a penguin persona, fit out their own igloo and play games. Habbo Hotel, a service run from Finland, is a global hangout for teenagers who want to customise their own rooms and meet in public places to attend events. Gala Online, based in Silicon Valley, offers similar activities, but is visited mostly by older teens who are into Manga comics. Not a hit with advertisers, these online worlds earn most of their money from the sale of virtual goods, such as items to spruce up an avatar or a private room. They are paid for in a private currency, which members earn by participating in various activities, trading items or buying them with real dollars. This sort of stealth tax seems to work. At Gala Online, users spend more than $1 million per month on virtual items, says Craig Sherman, the firm's chief executive. Running such a virtual economy is not easy, which is why Gaia has hired a full-time economist to grapple with problems that are well known in the real world, such as inflation and an unequal distribution of wealth. There are other barriers that could limit the growth of virtual worlds for the young, but the main one is parents. Many do not want their offspring roaming virtual worlds, either because they are too commercial or are thought to be too dangerous. Keeping them safe is one of the biggest running costs, because their sponsors have to employ real people to police their realms. Youngsters are also a fickle bunch, says Simon Levene of Accel Partners, a venture- capital firm. Just as children move from one toy to another, they readily switch worlds or social networks, often without saying goodbye. Even so, Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, believes "these worlds are a training ground for the three-dimensional web". If virtual worlds for adults, which so far have been able to retain only hardcore users, manage to hang on for a few years, they may yet have a second life.

单选题According to the author, it would be more reasonable to think that the patients who exhibit dissatisfaction with the treatment are

单选题If you are what you eat, then you are also what you buy to eat. And mostly what people buy is scrawled onto a grocery list, those ethereal scraps of paper that record the shorthand of where we shop and how we feed ourselves. Most grocery lists end up in the garbage. But if you live in St. Louis, they might have a half-life you never imagined: as a cultural document, posted on the Internet. For the past decade, Bill Keaggy, 33, the features photo editor at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has been collecting grocery lists and since 1999 has been posting them online at www. grocerylists, org. The collection, which now numbers more than 500 lists, is strangely addictive. The lists elicit twofold curiosity-about the kind of meal the person was planning and the kind of person who would make such a meal. What was the shopper with vodka, lighters, milk and ice cream on his list planning to do with them? In what order would they be consumed? Was it a he or a she? Who had written "Tootie food, kitten chow, bird food stick, toaster scrambles, coffee drinks"? Some shoppers organize their lists by aisle; others start with dairy, go to cleaning supplies and then back to dairy before veering off to Home Depot. A few meticulous ones note the price of every item. One shopper had written in large letters on an envelope, simply, "Milk." The thin lines of ink and pencil jutting and looping across crinkled and torn pieces of paper have a purely graphic beauty. One of life's most banal duties, viewed through the curatorial lens, can somehow seem pregnant with possibility. It can even appear poetic, as in the list that reads "meat, cigs, buns, treats." One thing Keaggy discovered is that Dan Quayle is not alone-few people can spell bananas and bagels, let alone potato. One list calls for "suchi" and "strimp." "Some people pass judgment on the things they buy," Keaggy says. At the end of one list, the shopper wrote "Bud Light" and then "good beer." Another scribbled "good loaf of white bread." Some pass judgment on themselves, like the shopper who wrote "read, stay home or go somewhere, I act like my mom, go to Kentucky, underwear, lemon." People send messages to one another, too. Buried in one list is this statement: "If you buy more rice, I'll punch you." And plenty of shoppers, like the one with both ice cream and diet pills on the list, reveal their vices.

单选题It's the part of the job that stock analyst Hiroshi Naya dislikes the most: phoning investor managers on a Saturday or Sunday when he's working on a report and facing a deadline. In Japan, placing a work call to someone on the weekend "feels like entering someone's house with your shoes on, " says Naya, chief analyst at Ichiyoshi Research Institute in Tokyo. So last year, Naya started asking his questions via messages on Facebook. While a telephone call seems intrusive, he says, a Facebook message "feels more relaxed. " Many Japanese have become fans of Mark Zuckerberg's company in the past year. It's taken a while: Even as Facebook took off in India, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia, it's been a laggard in Japan since its local-language version debuted in 2008. The site faced cultural obstacles in a country where people historically haven't been comfortable sharing personal information, or even their names, on the Internet. Homegrown rivals such as community website operator Mixi and online game portals such as DeNA allow their users to adopt pseudonyms. The Japanese are overcoming their shyness, though. In February, Facebook had 13.5 million unique users, up from 6 million a year earlier. That puts Facebook in the No. 1 position in Japan for the first time, ahead of Twitter and onetime leader Mixi. "Facebook didn't have a lot of traction in Japan for the longest time, " says Arvind Rajan, Asia-Pacific managing director for Linkedln, which entered the Japanese market last October and hopes to emulate Face book's recent success. " They really did turn the corner, " he says. Rajan attributes the change in attitude to the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. During the crisis and its aftermath, sites such as Facebook helped parents and children locate each other and allowed people post and find reliable information. " The real-name case has been answered, " says Rajan. "People are getting it now. " Japanese see Facebook as a powerful business tool. The real-name policy makes the site a good place to cultivate relationships with would-be partners. As more companies such as retailers Uniqlo and Muji turn to Facebook to reach Japanese consumers, the Silicon Valley company is benefiting from a viruous cycle, says Koki Shiraishi, an analyst in Tokyo with Daiwa Securities Capital Markets. "It's a chicken-and-egg thing: If everyone starts using it, then more people start using it. " As a result of Facebook's rise, investors have soured on some of its rivals : DeNA's stock price has dropped 24 percent in the past year, and Mixi's has fallen 38 percent. Growth at Twitter—which also entered Japan in 2008—has stagnated, and the San Francisco company has partnered with Mixi to do joint marketing. Twitter Japan country manager James Kondo says there's no reason to worry. Japan's social networking scene "is a developing thing, " he says. "We're not in a flat market where everyone is competing for a share of a fixed pie. /

单选题On a five to three vote, the Supreme Court knocked out much of Arizona"s immigration law Monday—a modest policy victory for the Obama Administration. But on the more important matter of the Constitution, the decision was an 8-0 defeat for the Administration"s effort to upset the balance of power between the federal government and the states. In Arizona v. United States, the majority overturned three of the four contested provisions of Arizona"s controversial plan to have state and local police enforce federal immigration law. The Constitutional principles that Washington alone has the power to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization" and that federal laws precede state laws are noncontroversial. Arizona had attempted to fashion state policies that ran parallel to the existing federal ones. Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court"s liberals, ruled that the state flew too close to the federal sun. On the overturned provisions the majority held the congress had deliberately "occupied the field" and Arizona had thus intruded on the federal"s privileged powers. However, the Justices said that Arizona police would be allowed to verify the legal status of people who come in contact with law enforcement. That"s because Congress has always envisioned joint federal-state immigration enforcement and explicitly encourages state officers to share information and cooperate with federal colleagues. Two of the three objecting Justice—Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—agreed with this Constitutional logic but disagreed about which Arizona rules conflicted with the federal statute. The only major objection came from Justice Antonin Scalia, who offered an even more robust defense of state privileges going back to the Alien and Sedition Acts. The 8-0 objection to President Obama turns on what Justice Samuel Alito describes in his objection as "a shocking assertion of federal executive power". The White House argued that Arizona"s laws conflicted with its enforcement priorities, even if state laws complied with federal statutes to the letter. In effect, the White House claimed that it could invalidate any otherwise legitimate state law that it disagrees with. Some powers do belong exclusively to the federal government, and control of citizenship and the borders is among them. But if Congress wanted to prevent states from using their own resources to check immigration status, it could. It never did so. The administration was in essence asserting that because it didn"t want to carry out Congress"s immigration wishes, no state should be allowed to do so either. Every Justice rightly rejected this remarkable claim.

单选题The author's primary purpose in writing this passage is to ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} When I was in high school, I had almost no individual identity left. I was a Hillcrest Husky and all other high schools were enemies. I was a wrestler and all the other sports were gor wimps. I was on the debate team and everyone else was dumb. At my high school, everyone had a group; no one was an individual. Wait. I take that back. There were a few individuals, but they were completely outcast from our social order. Never in my life can I remember stronger feelings of hate tian in high school. But we never called it hate. We called it loyalty. As adults, most of us are better at being an individual than we were in high school, but the influences of group identity continue to promote competition and prejudice in our world. If you are like me, you want to avoid teaching rivalry, conflict and prejudice to your children. One possible strategy for stopping the negative influences of group identity would be: recognize and replay. Look for the prejudice in your life and replace it with charity. Treat every person as an individual and ignore the social classifications created by a group-dependent world. A good friend and I once discussed our differing religions beliefs. He identified with a certain group and I with another. Because of our dependence on group identity, our conversations revolved around the beliefs of the groups. Our individual beliefs, which were quite similar, took a back seat while we discussed topics we knew little about. We defended our groups even when we did not understand or know the official group position on many issues. The resulting rivalry has damaged our friendship ever since. My behavior in this situation is exactly what scripture and wisdom teach us to avoid. How stupid I was to judge my friend by a group standard! How stupid I was to defend my own group even in areas I knew nothing about! I hope I can teach my children to behave differently. Here, I have used religious beliefs to point only one area in which the influence of group identity can create problems. There are many others to consider also. Some of these are marriage, race, culture, language, geographic origin, education, and behavior. We should treat all people as individuals regardless of these conditions. Finally, loyalty and group identity are not always bad. At times, they can help a lonely person to feel loved or a broken soul to feel success. Group identity can also help us to live a higher standard. But positive peer pressure should never replace individual, one-to-one acts of service and love.

单选题The outcry over internet firms, habit of surreptitiously tracking web surfers, activities has clearly resonated inside the White House. The Obama administration announced that it intends to work with Congress to produce "a privacy bill of rights" giving American consumers greater control over how their information is collected and used by digital marketers. Those who have been lobbying for change agree with, but are unsympathetic to, internet firms' worries that such a law could dent their advertising-driven business models, which rely on tracking and targeting consumers to maximize revenues. "This is dimming the prospects of Google, Facebook and other digital ad companies," says Jeffrey Chester of the Centre for Digital Democracy. Quite how dark things get for them will depend on the details of the bill. It will seek to lay down the basic principles of internet privacy rights, broadly following recommendations published last December by the Department of Commerce. The department's report said consumers should be told more about why data are being collected about them and how they are used; and it called for stricter limits on what companies can do with information they collect. Whatever legislation finally emerges is likely to give a broader role to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which will almost certainly be charged with deciding how those principles are translated into practice and with policing their implementation. Among other things, the FTC is known to be keen on a formal "do not track" system, which would allow users to block certain sites from monitoring their online activities. Keen to avoid this, the online-advertising industry has been working overtime to convince policymakers that it can police itself using systems such as icons on web pages that show surfers when they are being tracked. And it is telling anyone who will listen that consumers will suffer if tough do-not-track rules hit ad revenues, forcing web firms to charge for more content. With Mr. Obama throwing his weight behind internet privacy, this rearguard action is less likely to be successful. Some ad firms have started talking of creating a do-not-track system of their own that would limit the damage to their digital activities. Although all this may dent their revenues, America's internet giants could also benefit from the legislation if it helps them in their dealings with the European Union. The EU's already fairly strict rules on privacy—which it considers a fundamental human right—are being tightened further. The time-consuming and expensive legal hoops the EU makes American internet firms jump through, to be allowed to handle Europeans' online data, will become more demanding. If by passing its own online-privacy "bill of rights", America can convince the EU to ease this legal burden, then it will be an important win for American companies, says Joel Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham University's law school. Google, Facebook and others will no doubt be tracking—both online and offline—the progress of EU-American talks on this matter very closely.