单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C, and D on ANSWER SHEET 1. Modern liberal opinion is sensitive to problems of restriction of freedom and abuse of power.{{U}} (1) {{/U}}, many hold that a man can be injured only by violating his will, but this view is much too{{U}} (2) {{/U}}. It fails to{{U}} (3) {{/U}}the great dangers we shall face in the{{U}} (4) {{/U}}of biomedical technology that stems from an excess of freedom, from the unrestrained{{U}} (5) {{/U}}of will. In my view, our greatest problems will be voluntary self-degradation, or willing dehumanization, as is the unintended yet often inescapable consequence of sternly and successfully pursuing our humanization{{U}} (6) {{/U}}. Certain{{U}} (7) {{/U}}and perfected medical technologies have already had some dehumanizing consequences. Improved methods of resuscitation have made{{U}} (8) {{/U}}heroic effort? to "save" the severely ill and injured. Yet these efforts are sometimes only partly successful: They may succeed in{{U}} (9) {{/U}}individuals, but these individuals may have sever brain damage and be capable of only a less-than-human, vegetating{{U}} (10) {{/U}}. Such patients have been{{U}} (11) {{/U}}a death with dignity. Families are forced to bear the burden of a{{U}} (12) {{/U}}"death watch". {{U}} (13) {{/U}}the ordinary methods of treating disease and prolonging life have changed the{{U}} (14) {{/U}}in which men die. Fewer and fewer people die in the familiar surroundings of home or in the{{U}} (15) {{/U}}of family and friends. This loneliness, {{U}}(16) {{/U}}, is not confined to the dying patient in the hospital bed. As a group, the elderly are the most alienated members of our society: Not yet{{U}} (17) {{/U}}the world of the dead, not deemed fit for the world of the living, they are shunted{{U}} (18) {{/U}}. We have learned how to increase their years, {{U}}(19) {{/U}}we have not learned how to help them enjoy their days. Yet we continue to bravely and feverishly push back the frontiers{{U}} (20) {{/U}}death.

单选题Until recently, mobile radio was to wireless communications what the Yugo was to transportation. With a mixed clientele ranging from truckers using CBs to police armed with walkie-talkies to taxi drivers dispatched by radio, it was viewed as an unglamorous business and a technological backwater. But specialized mobile radio, as it is known, has been rediscovered. It is now considered one of the biggest prizes in the all-out war for the public airwaves. The reason: high-tech companies have figured out how to profitably rebuild the antiquated dispatching system into an advanced cellular-telephone network that can take on the likes of AT & T and the giant Baby Bells. Upstart Nextel Communications sent shock waves through the industry last week when it agreed to buy Motorola's SMR frequencies for $1.8 billion. That could pose a serious threat to cellular hegemony. Although both systems are based on the same basic technology, SMR systems are digital and cover almost 25 times as much area as the average cellular network. SMR handsets won't work on cellular systems and tend to be bulkier than cellular phones, though they provide more features, like a digital pager service. And while cellular growth has tripled to some 13 million subscribers since 2000, the technology has been losing ground. It is running out of channel capacity so fast, in fact, that 40% of cellular calls in high-density areas like Manhattan and Los Angeles fail to be completed. SMRs have capacity to spare, and service could eventually be priced 10% to 15% less than cellular. Dispatchers predict they will have at least 10 million subscribers by the end of the decade. There are now about 1.5 million users of SMRs. The addition of another contender to an already crowded field of telephone systems will surely multiply the confusion. By the year 2010, consumers will be able to choose from at least half a dozen vendors of a dizzying array of wireless-communications services, including pagers, voice mail answering machines and cellular phones. Phone and cable television operators, such as Bell South, MCI and Cox Enterprises, are developing so-called personal communications networks, or PCNs, a highly advanced portable-phone system that is expected to cover a wider area, connect to a greater variety of services and be cheaper to operate than conventional cellular. And many companies that have gambled on the wrong technological standards, and invested billions trying to develop the same markets, will undoubtedly lose a great deal of money before the shakeout is over. "The winners," says Nextel chairman Morgan O'Brien, "will be those who can make the choice for consumers easy." With all the anticipated confusion--mindful of the early years of personal computers--it is likely to be years before anyone calls the purchase of wireless products an "easy" choice.

单选题The author contrasts the 1930's with the present in order to show that

单选题The number of the companies that were established in 2002 is about

单选题In the last paragraph, the author tries to justify his conclusion by

单选题"I'm a total geek all around," says Angela Byron, a 27-year-old computer programmer who has just graduated from Nova Scotia Community College. And yet, like many other students, she "never had the confidence" to approach any of the various open-source software communities on the internet-distributed teams of volunteers who collaborate to build software that is then made freely available. But thanks to Google, the world's most popular search engine and one of the biggest proponents of open-source software, Ms. Byron spent the summer contributing code to Drupal, an open-source project that automates the management of websites. "It's awesome," she says. Ms. Byron is one of 419 students (out of 8,744 who a'pplied) who were accepted for Google's "summer of code". While it sounds like a hyper-nerdy summer camp, the students neither went to Google's campus in Mountain View, California, nor to wherever their mentors at the 41 participating open-source projects happened to he located. Instead, Google acted as a matchmaker and sponsor. Each of the participating open-source projects received $500 for every student it took on; and each student received $4,500 ($500 right away, and $4,000 on completion of their work). Oh, and a T-shirt. All of this is the idea of Chris DiBona, Google's open-source boss, who was brainstorming with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, last year. They realised that a lot of programming talent goes to waste every summer because students take summer jobs flipping burgers to make money, and let their coding skills degrade. "We want to make it better for students in the summer," says Mr. DiBona, adding that it also helps the open-source community and thus, indirectly, Google, which uses lots of open-source software behind the scenes. Plus, says Mr. DiBona, "it does become an opportunity for recruiting. " Elliot Cohen, a student at Berkeley, spent his summer writing a "Bayesian network toolbox" for Python, an open-source programming language. "I'm a pretty big fan of Google," he says. He has an interview scheduled with Microsoft, but "Google is the only big company that I would work at," he says. And if that doesn't work out, he now knows people in the open-source community, "and it's a lot less intimidating. /

单选题"The imperative to self-knowledge has always been at the heart of philosophical inquiry," wrote MIT professor Sherry Turkle in the insightful book about the web and the self, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Published in 1995 as the second part of a trilogy that examined our relationships with technology, it looked at how we are who we are in online spaces. And what that means for us offline. The good news is that the results are positive: "Play has always been an important aspect of our individual efforts to build identity," she said, referencing developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, and nodding to the theories of psychoanalysts Freud, Lacan and Jung. "In terms of our views of the self," she wrote, "new images of multiplicity, heterogeneity, flexibility, and fragmentation dominate current thinking about human identity. " At the time Life on the Screen was released, most of the visitors were college students and their professors from a remarkably small talent pool, and a surprisingly small geography. They were tech-savvy, and generically open-minded about the new fields of virtual exploration that lay within the networks of this new communication platform. They were, in other words, liberal, enlightened types who were more willing to embrace the unprecedented fluidity of self-expression that this new technology uniquely afforded. As a psychoanalyst and a web user herself, Turkle spent much of the book explaining why the articulation of multiple personalities wasn't pathological. Contrary to its Latin root, identity need not mean "the same", she argued. "No one aspect can be claimed as the absolute, true self", she wrote, maintaining that the web allowed us the opportunity to get to know our "inner diversity". In the great psychoanalytic tradition, she said that self-actualisation meant coming to terms with who we are, and integrating each aspect of it into a coherent and well-integrated us. Almost everyone has experienced this kind of identity play. Even if you've never ventured into an online game or been a signed-up member of a web community, you've probably developed a profile for a social network, written a blog, styled a website, commented on an article. But things are different from the time when Turkle was writing Life on the Screen. Nowadays, our virtual social lives are increasingly integrated. with our offline social lives. The freedom of expression is curtailed by the threat of offline consequences from online actions. Today, your reputation offline is far more closely tied to your reputation online than before. In fact, our experience of contemporary identity online is disarmingly similar to offline. However, I still subscribe to the old Turkle. Consequence-free online environments allow us to practise and play without fear of offline effect, and offer an extraordinary place to experience the fluidity of our selves: I can be anyone, even a dog. As Tom MacMaster found, there still are places online where this is possible.

单选题In a paper just published in Science, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Piraha and their counting system to try to answer a tricky linguistic question. The Piraha, a group of hunter-gatherers who live along the banks of the Maiei River in Brazil, use a system of counting called "one-two-many". In this, the word for "one" translates to "roughly one" (similar to "one or two" in English), the word for "two" means "a slightly larger amount than one" (similar to "a few" in English), and the word for "many" means "a much larger amount". This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorl in the 1930s. Whorl studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from tile Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought. While there is no dispute that language influences what people think about, evidence suggesting it determines thought is inconclusive. For example, in 1972, Eleanor Rosch and Karl Heider investigated the colour-naming abilities of the Dani people of Indonesia. The Dani have words for only two colours.- black and white. But Dr. Rosch and Dr. Heider found that, even so, Dani could distinguish and comprehend other colours. That does not support the deterministic version of the Whorl hypothesis. While recognising that there are such things as colours for which you have no name is certainly a cognitive leap, it may not be a good test of Whorf's ideas. Colours, after all, are out there everywhere. Numbers, by contrast, are abstract, so may be a better test. Dr. Gordon therefore spent a month with the Piraha and elicited the help of seven of them to see how far their grasp of numbers extended. The tests began simply, with a row of, say, seven evenly spaced batteries. Gradually, they got more complicated. The more complicated tests included tasks such as matching numbers of unevenly spaced objects, replicating the number of objects from memory, and copying a number of straight lines from a drawing. In the tests that involved matching the number and layout of objects they could see, participants were pretty good when faced with two or three items, but found it harder to cope as the number of items rose. Things were worse when the participants had to remember the number of objects in a layout and replicate it "blind", rather than matching a layout they could see. In this case the success rate dropped to zero when the number of items became, in terms of their language, "many". And line drawing produced the worst results of all--though that could have had as much to do with the fact that drawing is not part of Piraha culture as it did with the difficulties of numerical abstraction. Indeed, Dr. Gordon described the task of reproducing straight lines as being accomplished only with "heavy sighs and groans".

单选题The decision of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director has been the talk of the classical-music world ever since the sudden announcement of his appointment in 2009. For the most part, the response has been favorable, to say the least. “Hooray! At last!” wrote Anthony Tommasini, a sober-sided classical-music critic. One of the reasons why the appointment came as such a surprise, however, is that Gilbert is comparatively little known. Even Tommasini, who had advocated Gilbert's appointment in the Times, calls him “an unpretentious musician with no air of the formidable conductor about him.” As a description of the next music director of an orchestra that has hitherto been led by musicians like Gustav Mahler and Pierre Boulez, that seems likely to have struck at least some Times readers as faint praise. For my part, I have no idea whether Gilbert is a great conductor or even a good one. To be sure, he performs an impressive variety of interesting compositions, but it is not necessary for me to visit Avery Fisher Hall, or anywhere else, to hear interesting orchestral music. All I have to do is to go to my CD shelf, or boot up my computer and download still more recorded music from iTunes. Devoted concertgoers who reply that recordings are no substitute for live performance are missing the point. For the time, attention, and money of the art-loving public, classical instrumentalists must compete not only with opera houses, dance troupes, theater companies, and museums, but also with the recorded performances of the great classical musicians of the 20th century. There recordings are cheap, available everywhere, and very often much higher in artistic quality than today's live performances; moreover, they can be “consumed” at a time and place of the listener's choosing. The widespread availability of such recordings has thus brought about a crisis in the institution of the traditional classical concert. One possible response is for classical performers to program attractive new music that is not yet available on record. Gilbert's own interest in new music has been widely noted: Alex Ross, a classical-music critic, has described him as a man who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into “a markedly different, more vibrant organization.” But what will be the nature of that difference? Merely expanding the orchestra's repertoire will not be enough. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic are to succeed, they must first change the relationship between America's oldest orchestra and the new audience it hops to attract.

单选题Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank. Our ape-men forefathers had no obvious natural weapons in the struggle for{{U}} (1) {{/U}}in the open. They had neither the powerful teeth nor the strong claws of the big cats. They could not {{U}}(2) {{/U}}with the bear, whose strength, speed and claws{{U}} (3) {{/U}}an impressive " small fire" weaponry. They could not even defend themselves{{U}} (4) {{/U}}running swiftly like the horses, zebras or small animals. If the ape-men had attempted to compete on those terms in the open, they would have been{{U}} (5) {{/U}}to failure and extinction. But they were{{U}} (6) {{/U}}with enormous concealed advantages of a kind not possessed by any of their competitors. In the search{{U}} (7) {{/U}}the pickings of the forest, the ape-men had{{U}} (8) {{/U}}efficient stereoscopic vision and a sense of color that the animals of the grasslands did not{{U}} (9) {{/U}}. The ability to see clearly at close range permitted the ape-men to study practical problems in a way that lay far{{U}} (10) {{/U}}the reach of the original inhabitants of the grassland. Good long-distance sight was{{U}} (11) {{/U}}another matter. Lack of long-distance vision had not been a problem for forest-dwelling apes and monkeys because the{{U}} (12) {{/U}}the viewpoint, the greater the range of sight-so{{U}} (13) {{/U}}they had had to do was climb a tree. Out in the open, however, this simple solution was not{{U}} (14) {{/U}}. Climbing a hill would have helped, but in many places the ground was flat. The ape-men{{U}} (15) {{/U}}the only possible solution. They reared up as high as possible on their hind limbs and began to walk{{U}} (16) {{/U}}. This vital change of physical position brought about considerable disadvantages. It was extremely unstable and it meant that the already slow ape-men became{{U}} (17) {{/U}}still. {{U}}(18) {{/U}}, they persevered and their bone structure gradually became{{U}} (19) {{/U}}to the new, unstable position that{{U}} (20) {{/U}}them the name Homo erectus, upright man.

单选题In an interview last month, Frank Church, chairman of the Senate committee that is investigating the CIA, issued an oblique but impassioned warning, that the technology of eavesdropping had become so highly developed that Americans might soon be left with "no place to hide". That day may have arrived. Newsweek has learned that the country's most secret intelligence operation, the National Security Agency, already possesses the computerized equipment to monitor nearly all overseas telephone calls and most domestic and international printed messages. The agency's devices monitor thousands of telephone circuits, cable lines and the microwave transmissons that carry an increasing share of both spoken and written communications. Computers are programed to watch for "trigger" words or phrases indicating that a message might interest intelligence analysis, when the trigger is pulled, entire messages are tape-recorded or printed out. That kind of eavesdropping is, however, relatively simple compared with the breakthroughs that lie ahead in the field of snoopery. Already it is technically feasible to "bug" an electric typewriter by picking up its feeble electronic emissions from a remote location and then translating them into words. And some scientists believe that it may be possible in the future for remote electronic equipment to intercept and "read" human brain waves. Where such capabilities exist, so too does the potential for abuse. It is the old story of technology rushing forward with some new wonder, before the man who supposedly control the machines have figure out how to prevent the machines from controlling them.

单选题Technologists aren' t usually known for their sense of humor, but last week Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, was working hard to come up with the Quip of the Day. For four contentious hours, he and another casualty of the software wars, Netscape's Jim Barksdale, took turns before the Senate Judiciary committee slamming their nemesis, Bill Gates. They called him a predator, a monopolist, the "most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age!. Microsoft's Windows operating systems, driving 90 percent of the computers across the land, are the railroads of our dawning Information Age. No one person should be allowed to control them, they argued. Cyberspace should be open to all, Gates insisted it still was. He's no monopolist, he told the senators. Windows is vulnerable. So is his company. "Technology is ever-changing," Gates retorted. Who knows what new wave will come along and sweep even mighty Microsoft into the dustbin of history? To many that sounded a bit disingenuous, given Microsoft's dominance, and the lawmakers were skeptical, to say the least. But might Gates be right? Last week's other big tech news gave just such a hint. First, Intel announced a surprise drop in first-quarter earnings. That was followed late Friday by report that Compaq's financials would also be disappointing. Demand for computers seems to be slowing, analyst suggested--a trend due in part to a range of short-term factors, including Asia's economic crisis. "I don' t think we have clear date either as a company or an industry as to what these numbers mean," says Intel spokesman Howard High, True enough. But the slowdown is a sharp reminder that consumer demand for computers has fallen short of the hype surrounding the Info Revolution. Three years ago, 31 percent of U.S. house holds owned a computer. Today, 40 percent do. "We should be at 60 to 65 percent," says Nick Donatiello, president of Odyssey Communications, a San Francisco market-research firm. For most Americans, he suggests, the personal computer is not yet the indispensable tool that digital enthusiasts think it is. Today, new products are coming out that resemble computers but aren't, and they may eventually appeal to frustrated consumers more than hard-to-use PCs. The computer "is a technology-driven device made by technologists for technologists who don't know any better," says Donald Norman, senior technical adviser to Hewlett Packard. At the same time, new alliances between companies and industries are aiming to dash in on the Internet of tomorrow--without partnering with the titans of today. If all this poses a challenge for Intel, it portends even greater difficulties for Microsoft. All the challenges and threats pose a compelling question: if Microsoft enjoys the monopoly critics say it has, how long will it last?

单选题Which of the following statements is NOT true according the passage?

单选题Based on the information provided in paragraph 3, if a man dreamed of being hit by a train, it is likely that he______.

单选题On the ground floor of the Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC, there is an electronic game which tests a visitor's skill at setting interest rates. You have to decide how to respond to events such as rising inflation or a stockmarket crash. If you get all the answers right, the machine declares you the next Fed chairman. In real life, because of huge uncertainties about data and how the economy works, there is no obviously right answer to the question of when to change interest rates. Nor is there any easy test of who will make the best Fed chairman. So who would The Economist select for the job? Alan Greenspan will retire as Fed chairman on January 31st, after a mere 181/2 years in the job. So George Bush needs to nominate a successor soon. Mr. Bush has a penchant for picking his pals to fill top jobs: last week he nominated his personal lawyer Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. But his personal bank manager really would not cut the mustard as Fed chairman. This is the most important economic-policy job in America—indeed in the whole world. The Fed chairman sets interest rates with the aim of controlling inflation, which in turn helps determine the value of the dollar, the world's main reserve currency. It is hardly surprising that financial markets worldwide can rise or fall on his every word. Financial markets are typically more volatile during the first year after the handover to a new chairman than during the rest of his tenure. In October 1987,barely two months after Mr. Greenspan took office, the stock market crashed. Current conditions for a handover are hardly ideal. America's economy has never looked so unbalanced, with a negative household savings rate, a housing bubble, a hefty budget deficit, a record current-account deficit and rising inflation. Figures due on October 14th are expected to show that the 12-monthrate of inflation has risen above 4% —its highest since 1991.