单选题In which of the following does the author present the passage?

单选题Advertising sells its products by offering seductive promises of youth, beauty, health, money, ease, romance, better lifestyle, even time. There's no logical connection between a car and a cougar, but the image is powerful and presented with sophistication. We buy it and we may well buy the product. When it comes to advertising, let the buyer beware. There are several less-than-candid techniques which advertisers use to get our attention. A product may be filmed or photographed in such a way to make it appear bigger, better, or more luscious. A product may be presented as being "unique", "one-of-a-kind", or "supreme", when in fact it's identical to other products on the market. A product may claim to be "new" or "improved" when only an insignificant change has been made. Finally, an advertiser may offer distorted truths or even tell outright lies. It takes a while for the government or the competition to catch up with false claims in advertising. Meanwhile, the public has been led to believe that a mouth wash can cure the common cold, or that bee pollen retards aging in human skin. The consumer's best defense is awareness. He can listen to, but not learn, the emotional message broadcast by the ad. He can distinguish between what the ad pretends to offer and what it is really selling. A face cream, for example, can only do so much. It can reduce dryness and provide temporary smoothness and moisture to the skin. But it is made in a factory, not in a magician's study. It cannot turn back the clock.

单选题It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most right-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa. And the same competitive advantage is enjoyed by left-handers in other sports, such as tennis and cricket. The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialization of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans (and all other vertebrate animals ) underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180° relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain (and thus the right body ) is usually dominant. And on average, left-handers are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond, of the University of Montpellier Ⅱ, in France, think they know the answer. As they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, there is a clue in the advantage seen in boxing. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left- handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is true, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond set out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modern societies often involves the use of technology, notably firearms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond decided to confine their investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence (by number of homicides) in traditional societies. By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, the two researchers found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1000 inhabitants per year (compared with, for example, 0.068 in New York). And, according to Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0.013 murders per 1000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left- handed. While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right- handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister".

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Even to his contemporaries, Rochester was a legendary figure One of the youngest and most handsome courtiers of the restored Charles Ⅱ. he was the favorite of a king whose wit, lasciviousness and serious intellectual interests he shared. He was banished from court several times, but Charles's pleasure in his conversation always resulted in his recall. His authentic adventures included the attempted abduction of an heiress (whom he later married), smashing a phallic-shaped sundial in the royal gardens during a drunken celebrity, and a violent quarrel with the watch at Epsom in which one of his companions was killed. Quite apart from his reputation as a poet. he was feted in the writings of his friends, notably in Sir George Etherege's comedy, "The Man of Mode". Just before he died in 1680. at the age of 33. destroyed by alcoholism and syphilis. Rochester's legend took a surprising turn. After a series of conversations with an Anglican rationalist divine. Gilbert Burner, the skeptical libertine made a death- bed conversion which was celebrated in the devotional literature of the succeeding century. Charming as it is. the Rochester legend has always been a distraction It has resulted in many apocryphal stories and uncertain attributions, and it can still divert attention from the poetry. It is Rochester's achievement as a poet which commands our interest and makes him something more than a luridly colorful period, figure. For all the brevity of his career, Rochester is a crucial figure in the development of English verse satire and file Horatian epistle, a student of his elder French contemporary Boileau. and an important exemplar for later poets as different as Alexander Pope and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. Cephas Goldsworthy's "The Satyr" gives us the legend. Although there are no footnotes to sources, the book shows some acquaintance with modem Rochester scholarship and its rejection of spurious verse from his canon—but only intermittently. Anecdotes concerning Rochester and his crony George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. are retailed without any indication that they have, in fact. been discredited; poems no longer attributed to Rochester are cited as if they were authentic. Mr. Goldsworthy quotes liberally from the poetry, but repeatedly reads it as straightforward autobiography. For example, we are told that "My dear mistress has a heart" is addressed to. Elizabeth Barry, an actress, which is incautious given the uncertain dating of this song, and indeed of most of Rochester's poems. More generally, while of course some of the satires include references to actual persons, as often as not in 17th-century love poetry the emotion is genuine but the addressee is fictitious. A less simplistic way to relate Rochester's poetry to his life would be to read the former as an exploiation of what it means to live according to libertine values. In his best satires and even some of the lyrics he articulated an anti-rational .{{U}}nihilistic{{/U}} vision scarcely found elsewhere in English verse. Such a task belongs to a critical biography. There is no mistaking Mr. Goldsworthy's enthusiasm for his subject, but his book is essentially biography as entertainment.

单选题When lab rats sleep, their brains revisit the maze they navigated during the day, according to a new study (1) yesterday, offering some of the strongest evidence (2) that animals do indeed dream. Experiments with sleeping rats found that cells in the animals' brains fire in a distinctive pattern (3) the pattern that occurs when they are (4) and trying to learn their way around a maze. Based on the results, the researchers concluded the rats were dreaming about the maze, (5) reviewing what they had learned while awake to (6) the memories. Researchers have long known that animals go (7) the same types of sleep phases that people do, including rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, which is when people dream. But (8) the occasional twitching, growling or barking that any dog owner has (9) in his or her sleeping pet, there's been (10) direct evidence that animals (11) . If animals dream, it suggests they might have more (12) mental functions than had been (13) . "We have as humans felt that this (14) of memory—our ability to recall sequences of experiences—was something that was (15) human," Wilson said. "The fact that we see this in rodents (16) suggest they can evaluate their experience in a significant way. Animals may be (17) about more than we had previously considered." The findings also provide new support for a leading theory for (18) humans sleep—to solidify new learning. "People are now really nailing down the fact that the brain during sleep is (19) its activity at least for the time immediately before sleep and almost undoubtedly using that review to (20) or integrate those memories into more usable forms," said an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

单选题The word "obsessed" (Line 4, Paragraph 1) may mean

单选题In 1998 consumers could purchase virtually anything over the Internet. Books, compact discs, and even stocks were (1) from World Wide Websites that seemed to (2) almost daily a few years earlier, some people had predicted that consuners accustomed to shopping in stores would be (3) to buy things that they could not see or touch (4) . For a growing number of time-starved consumers, however, shopping from their home computer was proving to be a convenient (5) to driving to the store. A research estimated that in 1998 US consumers could purchase $ 7.3 billion of goods over the Internet, double the 1997 total. Finding a bargain was getting easier, (6) the rise of online auctions and Websites that did comparison shopping on the Internet for the best (7) . For all the consumer interest, (8) in eyberspaee was still a largely (9) business, however. Internet pioneer Amazon. eom, which began selling books in 1995 and later (10) into recorded music and videos, posted (11) of $ 153.7 million in the third quarter, up from $ 37.9 million in the same period of 1997. Overall, (12) , the company' s loss widened to $ 45.2 million from $9.6 million, and analysts did not expect the company to turn a profit (13) 2001. (14) the great loss, Amazon. tom had a stock market value of many billions, reflecting investors' (15) about the future of the industry. Internet retailing appealed (16) investors because it provided an efficient means for reaching millions of consumers without having the cost of operating (17) stores with their armies of salespeople. Selling online carried its own risks, however, (18) so many companies competing tor consumers' attention, price competition was (19) and profit (20) thin or nonexistent.

单选题As used the first line, the phrase "talk back" means ______.

单选题Some time between digesting Christmas dinner and putting your head back down to work, spare a thought or two for the cranberry. It is, of course, a (1) of Christmas: merry bright red, bittersweetly delicious with turkey and the very devil to get out of the tablecloth (2) spilled. But the cranberry is also a symbol of the modern food industry-and in the tale of its (3) from colonial curiosity to business-school case study (4) a deeper understanding of the opportunities and (5) of modern eating. The fastest growing part of today's cranberry market is for cranberries that do not taste like cranberries. Ocean Spray's "flavoured fruit pieces" (FFPS, to the trade) taste like orange, cherry, raspberry or any (6) of other fruits. They are in fact cranberries. Why make a cranberry taste like an orange? Mostly because it is a (7) little fruit: FFPS have a shelf-life of two years. Better (8) , they keep a chewy texture (9) baked, unlike the fruits whose flavours they mimic, which turn to (10) . The dynamic that has brought the cranberry to this point is (11) to the dynamic behind most mass-produced goods. Growing (12) provided the (13) to create cheaper and more reliable supply. Cheaper and more reliable supply, (14) , created incentives to find new markets, which increased demand. Thus was the (15) kept churning. The cranberry is one of only three fruits native (16) North America, growing wild from Maine to North Carolina. (The others are the Concord grape and the blueberry). The American Indians had several names for cranberries, many (17) the words for "bitter" or, more (18) , "noisy". They ate the berries mostly (19) pemmican, but also used them for dye and medicine. And they introduced them to the white settlers--at the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621, it is said. The settlers promptly renamed this delicacy the "crane berry", (20) the pointy pink blossoms of tile cranberry look a bit like the head of the Sandhill crane.

单选题James Q. Wilson supports Mary Eberstadt's new book because

单选题Electronics are being recycled in record numbers as more states require it and more companies collect and even pay for discarded items, but the gains come with controversy. Some environmentalists complain that recycling is not keeping pace with electronics sales. Some say e-waste is being dumped in developing countries, where toxic materials such as lead and mercury can leach from landfills into groundwater. "It is a success story, but we'd like to see it get more successful" to keep up with the electronics boom, says Janette Petersen of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The amount of recycled items more than doubled from 1999 to 2007, the most recent year for which the EPA has figures. But as a percentage of all electronics, it increased less, from 15% to 18%. "The demand for electronics recycling has been growing," partly because of the switch last year to digital TV, says Jennifer Berry of Earth911. corn, a private group that keeps a database of recyclers. Last year, she says 31% of inquiries involved electronics, primarily TVs, batteries and computers. Public and private efforts are expanding. Vermont became the 21st state last month to enact a law that requires e-waste recycling. Twenty-six companies--including Dell, Hewlett Packard, ATT and Verizon--have partnered with the EPA on the Plug-In to eCycling program to promote electronics recycling since its launch in 2003. Companies such as Gazelle. corn pay for used gadgets such as iPods, which they resell or recycle. Best Buy and other stores are collecting more e-waste. Target announced last month that it put bins in every store to accept cellphones, MP3 players and ink cartridges. Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based non-profit organization that aims to stop toxic exports, worries that some American companies dump e-waste in Africa to save money. "People are trying to look green, but they're not telling you where it (waste) is going," he says. "You can't turn over your TV to just any recycler. " He says it's better to store an old TV than give it to a recycler that may export it to poor countries. The Basel Action Network announced its e-Stewards program last month to ensure safe handling of electronics by using only recyclers certified by accredited organizations. It now lists 45 recyclers in 80 locations. Samsung and other companies have signed on. Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, back it.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Halfway through" The Rebel Sell," the authors pause to make fun of" free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not, in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But" a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earth-worm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark corner of the barn. Only about 15% of" free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them. This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that" the counterculture," in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud, the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville"," The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world's funniest joke. Why range so widely? The authors' beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization, or buy fair-trade coffee and flee-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein ("No Logo") and Alissa Quart("Branded"), come in for special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions. Anticipating criticism, perhaps, Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural" arms race": each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors'. Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. (This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure.) But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticise every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain, for homogenisation, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathise with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were. Still,it would be a shame if the book' s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War Ⅱ critiques of modem society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humour to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.

单选题The example of Telewest is mentioned to show that