单选题One great benefit of the Web is that it allows us to move information online that now resides in paper form. Several states in America are using the Web in a profound way. You can apply for various permits or submit applications for business licences. Some states are putting up listings of jobs—not just state government jobs, but all the jobs available in the state. I believe, over time, that all the information that governments print, and all those paper forms they now have, will be moved on to the Internet. Electronic commerce notches up month-by-month too. It is difficult to measure, because a lot of electronic commerce involves existing buyers and sellers who are simply moving paperbased transactions to the Web. That is not new business. Microsoft, for example, purchases millions of dollars of PCs online instead of by paper. However, that is not a fundamental change; it has just improved the efficiency of an existing process. The biggest impact has occurred where electronic commerce matches buyers and sellers who would not previously have found each other. When you go to a book site and find an obscure book that you never would have found in a physical bookstore, that is a new type of commerce. Today, about half of all PCs are still not connected to the Web. Getting communications costs down and making all the software simpler will bring in those people. And that, in turn, will move us closer to the critical mass that will make the Web lifestyle everyone's lifestyle. One clement that people underestimate is the degree to which the hardware and software will improve. Just take one aspect: screen technology. I do my e-mail on a 20-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) monitor. It is not available at a reasonable price yet, but in two years it will be. In ten years, a 40-inch LCD with much higher resolution will be commonplace. The boundary between a television set and a PC will be blurred because even the set-top box that you connect up to your cable or satellite will have a processor more powerful than what we have today in the most expensive PC. This will, in effect, make your television a computer. Interaction with the Web also will improve, making it much easier for people to be involved. Today the keywords we use to search the Web often return to too many articles to sort through, many of them out of context. If you want to learn about the fastest computer chip available, you might end up getting responses instead about potato chips being delivered in fast trucks. In the future, we shall be either speaking or typing sentences into the computer. If you ask about the speed of chips, the result will be about computers, not potatoes. Speech recognition also means that you will be able to call in on a phone and ask if you have any new messages, or check on a flight, or check on the weather. To predict that it will take over ten years for these changes to happen is probably pessimistic. We usually overestimate what we can do in two years and underestimate what we can do in ten. The Web will be as much a way of life as the car by 2008. Probably before.

单选题Work looks a better cure for poverty than welfare Especially as fewer and fewer countries will be able to afford to pay potential workers to stay at home a Victorian idea is back in favour: many poor people are better off when they are pulled back into the labour market. The idea revived first in the United States. There, in its harshest form, the unemployed work in exchange for welfare. But countries with governments to the left of America's, including Labour Australia and Socialist France, are now also exploring ways to link income support and employment policy. Coming from different directions, the right and the left are gradually finding new common ground. For the right, it seems deplorable to encourage the poor to rely on the state for cash, because they get hooked on government help and accustomed to being poor. For the left, it seems deplorable to allow workers to drop out of the job market for long periods, because it makes it harder for them to find new jobs. For both, the answer is to get the poor to work. Most industrial countries have a two-tier system of social protection: a social-security scheme, where workers and their bosses make regular contributions in exchange for payments to workers when they are unemployed, sick or retired; and a safety-net, to give some income to those poor people who have exhausted their social insurance or who have none The former is usually not means-tested but, for the unemployed, is of limited duration; the latter is almost always tied to income The public tends to approve of contributory benefits, which is what designers of such schemes intended. Safety-net benefits carry no such sense of entitlement, and are less popular. Yet they have grown more rapidly in large part because the 1980-82 recession increased the number of people of working age who had exhausted their right to contributory benefits. And an increasing proportion of the poor are people for whom the contributory systems were never designed: the young and lone mothers. In consequence, payments which carry a clear entitlement have become less significant, compared with those which appear to depend purely on state charity. The rise in the bill for the unpopular kind of social protection comes at a time when governments want to curb state spending. It comes, too, at a time when many countries have done almost everything they can think of to protect the poor. A decade ago many on the left argued that poverty was usually caused by circumstances outside the control of the poor—a lack of jobs, disability, old age, racial discrimination, broken marriages. One way or another, governments have tried to tackle most of these problems. Still the poor remain.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Despite Denmark's manifest virtues, Danes never talk about how proud they are to be Danes. This would sound weird in Danish. When Danes talk to foreigners about Denmark, They always begin by commenting on its tininess, its unimportance, the difficulty of its language, the general small-mindedness and self-indulgence of their countrymen and the high taxes. No Dane would look you in tire eye and say, "Denmark is a great country." You're supposed to figure this out for yourself. It is the land of the silk safety net, where almost half the national budget goes toward smoothing out life's inequalities, and there is plenty of money for schools, day care, retraining programs, job seminars. Danes love seminars: Three days at a study center hearing about waste management is almost as good as a ski trip. It is a culture bombarded by English, in advertising, pop music, the Internet, and despite all the English that Danish absorbs--there is no Danish Academy to defend against it--old dialects persist in Jutland that can barely be understood by Copenhageners. It is the land where, as the saying goes, "Few have too much and fewer have too little," and a foreigner is struck by the sweet egalitarianism that prevails, where the lowliest clerk gives you a level gaze, where Sir and Madame have disappeared from common usage, even Mr. and Mrs. It's a nation of recyclers--about 55% of Danish garbage gets made into something new--and no nuclear power plants. It's a nation of tireless planners. Trains run on time. Things operate well in general. Such a nation of overachievers--a brochure from the Ministry of Business and Industry says, "Denmark is one of the world's cleanest and most organized countries, with virtually no pollution, crime, or poverty. Denmark is the most corruption-free society in the Northern hemisphere." So, of course, one's heart lifts at any sighting of Danish sleaze: skinhead graffiti on buildings ("Foreigners out of Denmark!"), broken beer bottles in the gutters, drunken teenagers slumped in the park. Nonetheless, it is an orderly land. You drive through a Danish town, it comes to an end at a stone wall, and on the other side is a field of barley, a nice clean line: town here, country there. It is not a nation of jaywalkers. People stand on the curb and wait for the red light to change, even if it's 2 a.m. and there's not a car in sight. However, Danes don’t think of themselves as a waiting-at-2-a, m.-for-the-green-light people--that's how they see Swedes and Germans. Danes see themselves as jazzy people, improvisers, more free spirited than Swedes, but the truth is (though one should not say it) that Danes are very much like Germans and Swedes. Orderliness is a main selling point. Denmark has few natural resources, limited manufacturing capability; its future in Europe will be as a broker, banker, and distributor of goods. You send your goods by container ship to Copenhagen, and these bright, young, English-speaking, utterly honest, highly disciplined people will get your goods around to Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and Russia. Airports, seaports, highways, and rail lines are ultramodern and well-maintained. The orderliness of the society doesn't mean that Danish lives are less messy or lonely than yours or mine, and no Dane would tell you so. You can hear plenty about bitter family feuds and the sorrows of alcoholism and about perfectly sensible people who went off one day and killed themselves. An orderly society cannot exempt its members from the hazards of life. But there is a sense of entitlement and security that Danes grow up with. Certain things are yours by virtue of citizenship, and you shouldn't feel bad for taking what you're entitled to, you're as good as anyone else. The rules of the welfare system are clear to everyone, the benefits you get if you lose your job, the steps you take to get a new one; and the orderliness of the system makes it possible for the country to weather high unemployment and social unrest without a sense of crisis.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Culture is the sum total of all the traditions, customs, belief and ways of life of a given group of human beings. In this sense, every group has a culture, however savage, undeveloped, or uncivilized it may seem to us. To the professional anthropologist, there is no intrinsic superiority of one culture over another, just as to the professional linguist there is no intrinsic hierarchy among languages. People once thought of the languages of backward groups as savage, undeveloped form of speech, consisting largely of grunts and groans. While it is possible that language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is a fact established by the study of "backward" languages that no spoken tongue answers that description today. Most languages of uncivilized groups are, by our most severe standards, extremely complex, delicate, and ingenious pieces of machinery for the transfer of ideas. They fall behind the western languages not in their sound patterns or grammatical structures, which usually are fully adequate for all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, which reflect the objects and activities known to their speakers. Even in this department, however, two things are to he noted: 1. All languages seem to possess the machinery for vocabulary expansion; either by putting together words already in existence or by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system. 2. The objects and activities requiring names and distinctions in "backward" languages, while different from ours; are often surprisingly numerous and complicated. A western language distinguishes merely between two degrees of remoteness ("this" and "that"); some languages of the American Indians distinguish between what is close to the speaker, or the person addressed, or remote from both, or out of sight, or in the past, or in the future. This study of language, in turn, casts a new light upon the claim of the anthropologists that all cultures are to viewed independently, and without ideas of rank or hierarchy.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Time spent in a bookshop can be most enjoyable, whether you are a book-lover or merely there to buy a book as a present. You may even have entered the shop just to find shelter from a sudden shower. But the desire to pick up a book with an attractive dust-jacket is irresistible. You soon become absorbed in some book or other, and usually it is only much later that you realize that you have spent far too much time there. This opportunity to escape the realities of everyday life is, I think, the main attraction of a bookshop. There are not many places where it is possible to do this. A music shop is very much like a bookshop. You can wander round such places to your heart's content. If it is a good shop, no assistant will approach you with the inevitable greeting: "Can I help you, sir?" You needn't buy anything you don't want. In a bookshop an assistant should remain in the background until you have finished browsing. Then, and only then, are his services necessary. You have to be careful not to be attracted by the variety of books in a bookshop. It is very easy to enter the shop looking for a book on, say, ancient coins and to come out carrying a copy of the latest best-selling novel and perhaps a book about brass-rubbing- something which had only vaguely interested you up till then. This volume on the subject, however, happened to be so well illustrated and the part of the text you read proved so interesting that you just had to buy it. This sort of thing can be very dangerous. Booksellers must be both long suffering and indulgent. There is a story which well illustrates this. A medical student had to read a textbook which was far too expensive for him to buy. He couldn't obtain it from the library and the only copy he could find was in his bookshop. Every afternoon, therefore, he would go along to the shop and read a little of the book at a time. One day, however, he was dismayed to find the book missing from its usual place and about to leave when he noticed the owner of the shop beckoning to him. Expecting to be reproached, he went toward him. To his surprise, the owner pointed to the book, which was tucked away in a corner. "I put it there in case anyone was tempted to buy it," he said, and left the delighted student to continue his reading.{{B}}Notes:{{/B}} to one's heart's content尽情地。 beckon v. 打招呼。

单选题Some experts, like Chris Voss, think that

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The Lakers' forward Kobe Bryant has scored 50 or more points in four straight games, second in the NBA only to Wilt Chamberlain's seven. He also now is tied with Michael Jordan for second with four behind Chamberlain's 32 in most 60-point games. "He's doing something I've never seen," Lakers coach Phil Jackson said in an e-mail Saturday. "This has been historic." He should know because he coached Jordan and played against Chamberlain. Bryant is not going to win the MVP award, which likely will go to Dirk Nowitzki or Steve Nash. But his scoring brilliance again seems to answer the question of who's the best player in the league and it also provides more evidence in the similarity of Bryant and Jordan in their talent and approach to the game. In any ease, Bryant is the player now firmly holding that mythical torch of greatness, sporting celebrity and creativity that Jordan once took from Julius "Dr. J" Erring. "Kobe has the verdant green light to hoist it up until he cools down," Jackson said. "Wonders never cease in this game." Certainly, Bryant has been wonderful in the four games, averaging 56.3 points with two games of at least 60. Moreover, he hardly has been selfish or working outside the offense because most of his field goals have come on long jumpers, including 17 of 33 on three-pointers. Bryant is shooting 54 percent. "It's phenomenal. It's incredible," Jackson told Los Angeles reporters. "He's shooting [outside] more than Michael was. Michael was probably doing more post-up, more penetration, more at-the-basket kind of stuff. But Kobe's doing a whole range of things. I think his shooting has just been remarkable, the way he is raising up over people and knocking the ball down." It's still a long way off, but because he started in the NBA when he was 18, Bryant, 28, can pass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the league's all-time scorer if he can stay healthy and average 25 points until he is 38. "The best part of it all is that we're winning," Bryant said. "The second is that this generation of players who might not have ever heard of the Elgin [Baylors] or Wilts [and their] greatness will now take notice so the legacy of their brilliance will live on. "As far as myself, I can't explain it. All is in slow motion all the time. I don't know why or how, but it's trippy." That's probably what Chamberlain said during his record run.

单选题A small group of Internet security specialists gathered in Singapore to start up a global system to make e-mail and e-commerce more secure, end the rapid growth of passwords and raise the bar significantly for Internet fraud, spies and troublemakers. The Singapore event included an elaborate technical ceremony to create and then securely store numerical keys that will be kept in three hardened data centers there, in Zurich and in San Jose, Calif. The keys and data centers are working parts of a technology known as Secure DNS, or DNSSEC. DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which is a directory that connects names to numerical Internet addresses. Preliminary work on the security system had been going on for more than a year, but this was the first time the system went into operation, even though it is not quite complete. The three centers are fortresses made up of five layers of physical, electronic and cryptographic security, making it virtually impossible to damage the system. Four layers are active now. The fifth, a physical barrier, is being built inside the data center. The technology is viewed by many computer security specialists as a ray of hope amid the recent cascade of data thefts, attacks, disruptions and scandals, including break-ins at Citibank, Sony, Lockheed Martin, RSA Security and elsewhere. It allows users to communicate via the Internet with high confidence that the identity of the person or organization they are communicating with is not being tricked or forged. Internet engineers like Dan Kaminsky, an independent network security researcher who is one of the engineers involved in the project, want to counteract three major deficiencies in today's Internet. There is no mechanism for ensuring trust, the quality of software is uneven, and it is difficult to track down bad actors. One reason for these flaws is that from the 1960s through the 1980s the engineers who designed the network's underlying technology were concerned about reliable, rather than secure, communications. That is starting to change with the introduction of Secure DNS by governments and other organizations. The event in Singapore capped a process that began more than a year ago and is expected to be complete after 300 so-called top-level domains have been digitally signed. Before the Singapore event, 70 countries had adopted the technology, and 14 more were added as part of the event. While large countries are generally doing the technical work to include their own domains in the system, the association of Internet security specialists is helping smaller countries and organizations with the process.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} "You are not here to tell me what to do. You are here to tell me why I have done what I have already decided to do," Montagu Norman, the Bank of England's longest-serving governor (1920-1944), is reputed to have once told his economic adviser. Today, thankfully, central banks aim to be more transparent in their decision making, as well as more rational. But achieving either of these things is not always easy. With the most laudable of intentions, the Federal Reserve, America's central bank, may be about to take a step that could backfire. Unlike the Fed, many other central banks have long declared explicit inflation targets and then set interest rates to try to meet these. Some economists have argued that the Fed should do the same. With Alan Greenspan, the Fed's much-respected chairman, due to retire next year-after a mere 18 years in the job-some Fed officials want to adopt a target, presumably to maintain the central bank's credibility in the scary new post-Greenspan era. The Fed discussed such a target at its February meeting, according to minutes published this week. This sounds encouraging. However, the Fed is considering the idea just when some other central banks are beginning to question whether strict inflation targeting really works. At present centra1 banks focus almost exclusively on consumer-price indices. On this measure Mr. Greenspan can boast that inflation remains under control. But some central bankers now argue that the prices of assets, such as houses and shares, should also somehow be taken into account. A broad price index for America which includes house prices is currently running at 5.5%, its fastest pace since 1982. Inflation has simply taken a different form. Should central banks also try to curb increases in such asset prices? Mr. Greenspan continues to insist that monetary policy should not be used to prick asset-price bubbles. Identifying bubbles is difficult, except in retrospect, he says, and interest rates are a blunt weapon: an increase big enough to halt rising prices could trigger a recession. It is better, he says, to wait for a housing or stockmarket bubble to burst and then to cushion the economy by cutting interest rates-as he did in 2001-2002. And yet the risk is not just that asset prices can go swiftly into reverse. As with traditional inflation, surging asset prices also distort price signals and so can cause a misallocation of resources-encouraging too little saving, for example, or too much investment in housing. Surging house prices may therefore argue for higher interest rates than conventional inflation would demand. In other words, strict inflation targeting-the fad of the 1990s-is too crude.

单选题How many members are there in Ruth' s family?

单选题Imagine browsing a website when an attractive ad for lingerie catches your eye. You don't click on it, merely smile and go to another page. Yet it follows you, putting up more racy pictures, perhaps even the offer of a discount. Finally, annoyed by its persistence, you frown. "Sorry for taking up your time," says the ad, and promptly stops further disturbance. Creepy. But making online ads that not only know you are looking at them but also respond to your emotions will soon be possible, thanks to the power of image-processing software and the common existence of tiny cameras in computers and mobile devices. Uses for this technology would not, of course, be confined to advertising. There is ample scope to apply it in areas like security, computer gaming, education and health care. But advertisers are among the first to embrace the idea in earnest. Advertising firms already film how people react to ads, usually in an artificial setting. The participants' faces are studied for positive or negative feelings. A lot of research has been done into ways of categorizing the emotions behind facial expressions. Some consumer-research companies also employ cameras to track eye movements so they can be sure what their subjects are looking at. This can help determine which ads attract the most attention and where they might be placed for the best effect on a web page. One of the companies doing such work, Realeyes, which is based in London, has been developing a system that combines eye-spying webcams with emotional analysis. Mihkel Jaatma, who founded the company in 2007, says that his system is able to detect a person's mood by plotting the position of facial features, such as eyebrows, mouth and nostrils, and employing clever programs to interpret changes in their alignment—as when eyebrows are raised in surprise, say. Add eye-movement tracking, hinting at which display ads were overlooked and which were studied for any period of time, and the approach offers precisely the sort of quantitative data brand managers yearn for. At present the system is being used on purpose-built websites with, for instance, online research groups testing the effect of various display ads. The next step is to make interactive ads. Because they can spot the visual attention given to them, as well as the emotional state of the viewer, these ads could change their responses. As similar technologies become widespread, privacy concerns will invariably increase. People would need to give consent to their webcams being used in this way, Mr. Jaatma admits. One way to persuade Internet users to grant access to their images would be to offer them discounts on goods or subscriptions to websites.

单选题Internet data shows that younger adults have become the primary audience obsessed with television programs about altering people"s appearance. Once the domain of the female in her fifties, plastic surgery has become the obsession of the younger Internet users. The recent tragic death of Stephanie Kuleba, an 18-year-old high school cheer-leader who died as a result of a plastic surgery, brought our attention to the pursuit of a more "ideal" body amongst teenagers. In fact, search data confirms this phenomenon. One of the most popular sites visited from the search term "plastic surgery" is the official site of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (www. plasticsurgery. org). Over 25% of visitors to the site fell within the 18-to-24-year-old—that"s up from 19.6% two years ago. Plastic surgery has become an American obsession. Checking other markets, such as the U.K. and Australia, the 18-to-24-year-old fascination with plastic surgery is a definitely U.S. phenomenon. Looking at other health related sites visited by 18-to-24- year-olds reveals just how obsessed this age group is with appearance. Unlike the older groups who visit sites related to diseases and keeping healthy, younger Internet users flock to sites that dwell on personal appearance, such as those focused on body-building, weight loss and skin-care. And definitely plastic surgery. While surgery-themed television may be driving the interest of a younger audience, one factor appears to be key in moderating teens from altering their bodies: the failing U.S. economy. If we track the trend in searches on topics such as "plastic surgery", there has been a sharp decline in all plastic surgery topics over the last year. It may very well be related to the noticeable income group of visitors—U.S. households that earn less than $30,000 per year. In fact, if we look at the search patterns around popular surgeries, over the last year the term "cost" appear most commonly. While older age groups continue to search for information on procedures such as face-lifts or liposuction, it"s the younger Internet users who in tough economic times are focusing on improving their outer beauty, though at a discount price.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} In the USA, 85% of the population over the age if 21 approve of the death penalty. In the many states whcih still have the death penalty, some use the electric chair, which can take up to 20 minutes to kill, while others use gas or lethal injection. The first of these was the case of Ruth Ellis who was hanged for shooting her lover in what was generally regarded as a crime of passion. The second was hanged for murders which, it was later proved, had been committed by someone else. The pro-hanging lobby uses four main arguments to support its call for the reintroduction of capital punishment. First there is the deterrence theory, which argues that potential murderers would think twice before committing the act if they knew that they might die if they were caught. The armed bank robber might, likewise, go back to being unarmed. The other two arguments are more suspect. The idea of retribution demands that criminals should get what they deserve: if a murderer intentionally set out to commit a crime, he should accept the consequences. Retribution, which is just another word for revenge, is supported by the religious doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The arguments against the death penalty are largely humanitarian. But there are also statistical reasons for opposing it: the deterrence figures do not add up. In Britain,1903 was the the record year for executions and yet in 1904 the number of murders actually rose. There was a similar occurrence in 1946 and 1947. If the deterrence theory were correct, the rate should have fallen. The other reasons to oppose the death penalty are largely a mather of individual conscience and belief. One is that murder is murder and that the state has no more right to take a lifer than the individual. The other is that Christianity advises forgiveness, not revenge.

单选题The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is becoming mature. A man reaches the mature (1) of his reasoning powers and mental faculties (2) before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen. And then, too, in the case of woman, it is the only reason of a sort--very mean in its (3) . That is why women remain children their whole life long; never seeing (4) but what is quite close to them, (5) fast to the present moment, taking appearance for (6) , and preferring (7) to matters of the first importance. For it is (8) his reasoning faculty that man does not live in the present only, (9) the brute, but looks about him and considers the past and the future; and this is the origin of (10) , as well as that of care and anxiety which so many people (11) Both the advantages and the disadvantages, which this (12) , are (13) in by the woman to a smaller extent because of her weaker power of reasoning. She may, in fact, be described as intellectually shortsighted, (14) , while she has an immediate understanding of what lies quite close to her, her field of (15) is narrow and does not reach to what is (16) ; so that things which are absent, or past, or to come, have much less effect upon women than upon men. This is the reason why women are inclined to be (17) and sometimes carry their desire to a (18) that borders upon madness. In their hearts, women think it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it--if possible during their husband's life, (19) , at any rate, after his death. The very fact that their husband hands them (20) his earnings for purposes of housekeeping strengthens them in this belief.

单选题We can learn from the beginning that the competition in the travel industry revolves chiefly around