单选题Which of the following statements about manufacturing before 1870 can be inferred from the passage?______
单选题Vacation schools and extracurricular activities are mentioned in Para. 2 to illustrate alternatives to formal education pro- vided ______ by public schools.
单选题Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the great disparity between the native population of America in 1492--new estimates of which jump as high as 100 million, or approximately one-sixth of the human race at that time--and the few million full-blooded Native Americans alive at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that chronic disease was an important factor in the sharp decline, and it is highly probable that the greatest killer was epidemic disease, especially as manifested in virgin-soil epidemics. Virgin-soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless. That virgin-soil epidemics were important in American history is strongly indicated by evidence that a number of dangerous maladies--smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more--were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World. The effects of their sudden introduction are demonstrated in the early chronicles of America, which contain reports of horrible epidemics and steep population declines, confirmed in many cases by quantitative analyzes of Spanish tribute records and other sources. The evidence provided by the documents of British and French colonies is not as definitive because the conquerors of those areas did not establish permanent settlements and began to keep continuous records until the seventeenth century, by which time the worst epidemics had probably already taken place. Furthermore, the British tended to drive the native populations away, rather than to enslave them as the Spaniards did, so that the epidemics of British America occurred beyond the range of colonists' direct observation. Even so, the surviving records of North America do contain references to deadly epidemics among the native population. In 1616--1619 an epidemic, possibly of pneumonic plague, swept coastal New England, killing as many as nine out of ten, During the 1630's smallpox, the disease most fatal to the Native American people, eliminated half the population of the Huron and Iroquois confederations. In the 1820's fever ruined the people of the Columbia River area, killing eight out of ten of them. Unfortunately, the documentation of these and other epidemics is slight and frequently unreliable, and it is necessary to supplement what little we do know with evidence from recent epidemics among Native Americans. For example, in 1952 an outbreak of measles among the Native American inhabitants of Ungava Bay, Quebec, affected 99 percent of the population and killed 7 percent, even though some had the benefit of modern medicine. Cases such as this demonstrate that even diseases that are not normally fatal can have destroying consequences when they strike an immunologically defenseless community.
单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}}
"What's the difference between God and
Larry Ellison?" asks an old software industry joke. Answer: God doesn't think
he's Larry Ellison. The boss of Oracle is hardly alone among corporate chiefs in
having a reputation for being rather keen on himself. Indeed, until the bubble
burst and the public turned nasty at the start of the decade, the cult of the
celebrity chief executive seemed to demand bossly narcissism, as evidence that a
firm was being led by an all-conquering hero. Narcissus in Greek
myth met a nasty end, of course. And in recent years, boss-worship has come to
be seen as bad for business. In his management besteller, Good to Great, Jim
Collins argued that the truly successful bosses were not the self-proclaimed
stars who adorn the covers of Forbes and Fortune, but instead self-effacing,
thoughtful, monkish sorts who lead by inspiring example. A
statistical answer may be at hand. For the first time, a new study, "It's All
About Me", to be presented next week at the annual gathering of the American
Academy of Management, offers a systematic, empirical analysis of what effect
narcissistic bosses have on the firms they run. The authors, Arijit Chatterjee
and Donald Hambriek, of Pennsylvania State University, examined narcissism in
the upper echelons of 105 firms in the computer, and software
industries. To do this, they had to solve a practical problem:
studies of narcissism have hitherto relied on surveying individuals personally,
something for which few chief executives are likely to have time or inclination.
So the authors devised an index of narcissism using six publicly available
indicators obtainable without the co-operation of the boss. These are: the
prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report; his prominence in company
press releases; the length of his "Who's Who" entry; the frequency of his use of
the first person singular in interviews; and the ratios of his cash and non-cash
compensation to those of the firm's second-highest paid executive.
Narcissism naturally drives people to seek positions of power and
influence, and because great self-esteem helps your professional advance, say
the authors, chief executives will tend on average to be more narcissistic than
the general population. How does that affect a firm? Messrs Chatterjee and
Hambrick found that highly narcissistic bosses tended to make bigger changes in
the use of important resources, such as research and development, or in spending
and leverage; they carried out more and bigger mergers and acquisitions; and
their results were both more extreme (more big wins or big losses) and more
volatile than those of firms run by their humbler peers. For shareholders, that
could be good or bad.
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单选题By "Gossip also is a form of social bonding" (Para. 5), Professor Aaron Ben-Ze'ev means gossip______.
单选题Every year 100 million holiday-makers are drawn to the Mediterranean. With one third of the world's tourist trade, it is the most popular of all the holiday destinations: it is also the most polluted. It has only 1 percent of the world's sea surface, but carries more than half the oil and tar floating on the waters. Thousands of factories pour their poison into the Mediterranean, and almost every city, town and village on the coast sluices its sewage, untreated, into the sea. The result is that the Mediterranean, which nurtured so many civilizations, is gravely ill-the first of the seas to fall victim to the abilities and attitudes that evolved around it. And the population does not merely stifle the life of the sea-it threatens the people who inhabit and visit its shores. Typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, polio, viral hepatitis and food poisoning are endemic in the area, and there are periodic outbreaks of cholera. The mournful litany of disease is caused by sewage. Eight-five percent of the waste from the Mediterranean's 120 coastal cities is pushed out into the waters where their people and visitors bathe and fish. What is more, most cities just drop it in straight off the beach; rare indeed are the places like Cannes and Tel Aviv which pipe it even half a mile offshore. Less than 100, 000 of Greece's four million coastal people have their sewage properly treated-and Greece, is one of the cleaner countries of the northern shore. The worst parts of the sea are Israeli/Lebanon coast and between Barcelona and Genoa, which flushes out over 200 tons of sewage each year for every mile of its length. Not surprisingly, vast areas of the shallows are awash with bacteria and it doesn't take long for these to reach people. Professor William Brumfit of the Royal Free Hospital once calculated that anyone who goes for a swim in the Mediterranean has a one in seven chance of getting some sort of disease. Other scientists say this is an overestimate; but almost all of them agree that bathers are at risk. An even greater danger lurks in the seductive seafood dishes that add so much interest to holiday menu. Shellfish are prime carriers of many of the most vicious diseases of the area. They often grow amid pollution. And even if they don't they are frequently infected by the popular practice of "freshening them up" -throwing filthy water over them in markets. Industry adds its own poisons. Factories cluster round the coastline, and even the most modern rarely has proper waste-treatment plant. They do as much damage to the sea as sewage. Fifteen thousand factories foul the Italian Lihurian Riviera. Sixty thousand pollute the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia, Sicily and the west Italian coast! The lagoon of Venice alone receives the effluents of 76 factories. Thousands of tons of pesticides are blown off the fields into the sea, detergents from millions of sinks kill fish, and fertilizers, flushed out to sea, nourish explosions of plankton which cover bathers with itchy slime. Then there is the oil-130, 000 tons pouring each year from ships, 115, 000 tons more from industries round the shore. Recent studies show that the Mediterranean is four times as polluted as the north Atlantic, 20 times as bad as the north-east Pacific. Apart from the nine-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean is landlocked, virtually unable to cleanse itself. It takes 80 years for the water to be renewed, through the narrow, shallow straits, far too slow a process to cope with the remorseless rush of pollution.
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单选题Manners nowadays in metropolitan cities like London are practically non-existent. It is nothing for a big, strong schoolboy to elbow an elderly woman aside in the dash for the last remaining seat on the tube or bus, much less stand up and offer his seat to her, as he ought. In fact, it is saddening to note that if a man does offer his seat to an older woman, it is nearly always a Continental man or one from the older generation. This question of giving up seats in public transport is much argued about by young men, who say that, since women have claimed equality, they no longer deserve to be treated with courtesy, and that those who go out to work should take their turn in the rat race like anyone else. Women have never claimed to be physically as strong as men. Even if it is not agreed, however, that young men should stand up for younger women, the fact remains that courtesy should be shown to the old. the sick and the burdened. Conditions in travel are really very hard on everyone, we know, but hardship is surely no excuse. Sometimes one wonders what would have been the behavior of these about young men in a packed refugee train or a train on its way to a prisoner-camp during the war. Would they have considered it only right and their proper due to keep the best places for themselves then? Older people, tired and irritable from a day's work, are not angels, either--far from it. Many a brisk argument or an insulting quarrel breaks out as the weary queues push and shove each other to gel on buses and tubes. One cannot commend this, of course, but one does feel there is just a little more excuse. If cities are to remain pleasant places to live in at all, however, it seems urgent, not only that communications in transport should be improved, but also that communication between human beings should be kept smooth and polite. All over cities, it seems that people are too tired and too rushed to be polite. Shop assistants won't bother to assist, taxi drivers shout at each other as they dash dangerously round corners, bus conductors pull the bell before their desperate passengers have had time to get on or off the bus. and so on and so on. It seems to us that it is up to the young and strong to do their small part to stop such deterioration. Notes: much less 更不用说。Continental man 欧洲大陆上的人。rat race 激烈的竞争。be lost to 全然不顾。 all too 实在太。be hard on sh. 对...... 太严峻。due n.应该得到的东西。communications In transport 运输工具。won't bother to do sth. 不愿费心去做某事。pull the hell (售票员)拉铃(以便让司机开动车辆)。do one's part 尽某人的责任。
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单选题Pronouncing a language is a skill. Every normal person is an expert in the skill of pronouncing his own language, but few people are even moderately proficient at pronouncing foreign languages. Now there are many reasons for this, some obvious, some perhaps not so obvious. But I suggest that the fundamental reason why people in general do not speak foreign languages very much better than they do is that they fail to grasp the true nature of the problem of learning to pronounce, and consequently never set about tackling it in the right way. Far too many people fail to realize that pronouncing a foreign language is a skill, one that needs careful training of a special kind, and one that cannot be acquired by just leaving it to take care of itself. I think even teachers of language, while recognizing the importance of a good accent, tend to neglect, in their practical teaching, the branch of study concerned with speaking the language.
So the first point I want to make is that English pronunciation must be taught; the teacher should be prepared to devote some of the lesson time to this, and by his whole attitude to the subject should get the student to feel that here is a matter worthy of receiving his close attention. So there should be occasions when other aspects of English, such as grammar or spelling, are allowed for the moment to take second place.
Apart from this question of the time given to pronunciation, there are two other requirements for the teacher: the first, knowledge; the second, technique.
It is important that the teacher should be in possession of the necessary information. This can generally be obtained from books. It is possible to get from books some idea of the mechanics of speech, and of what we call general phonetic theory. It is also possible in this way to get a clear mental picture of the relationship between the sounds of different languages, between the speech habits of English people and those, say, of your students. Unless the teacher has such a picture, any comments he may make on his students" pronunciation are unlikely to be of much use, and lesson time spent on pronunciation may well be time-wasted.
But it does not follow that you can teach pronunciation successfully as soon as you have read the necessary books. It depends, after that, on what use you make of your knowledge, and this is a matter of technique.
Now the first and most important part of a language teacher"s technique is his own performance, his ability to demonstrate the spoken language, in every detail of articulation as well as in fluent speaking, so that the student"s latent capacity for imitation is given the fullest scope and encouragement. The teacher, then, should be as perfect a model in this respect as he can make himself. And to supplement his own performance, however satisfactory this may be, the modern teacher has at his disposal recordings, radio, television and video, to supply the authentic voices of native speakers, or, if the teacher happens to be a native speaker himself or speaks just like one, then to vary the method of presenting the language material.
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单选题What does the "invisible hand" ( Paragraph 5 ) refer to?
单选题Elen Evans' technology of new protein design may prove useful
单选题One thing that Ismael Matos, 23, says he's learned on his job as a special agent with the Geek Squad, is that there are no stupid questions—not even when a customer asks where the power button is. The goal, Matos says, is first to "strip out the jargon. " You know what he means: those terms like gigs, Ram, and motherboard that civilians don't typically use in everyday conversations. Once he establishes a common language with the customer, Matos can focus on building a relationshipone that he hopes will pay off in the future. Matos knows that clients often don't have the same skills he does. His customers ask for help not only with setting up new computers and installing software, but also with digital cameras, wireless Internet access and even getting their iPod synced with iTunes. We live in the age of Web2.0, when Internet viewers are fast becoming content creators. We may log in to social networking sites such as Digg and Technorati, rate or even upload videos on YouTube, and contribute and edit information on collaborate websites known as wikis. But members of this expanding plugged-in population aren't necessarily up to speed with the language of the web—or understand the technical lingo of the sales or customer service people they're turning to for assistance. According to a "Cyber Stress" survey of 1,001 American broadband Internet service users, 46 percent said the typical tech support person uses an excess of technical language, and 61 percent said they would prefer a "computer therapist" who is compassionate and easy to talk to. A question that online public relations strategist Sally Falkow says she's hearing often these days is, "How do we cope with all this?" she tells people, "There's no way you can escape this. There's a big conversation going on," and it's important to learn how to be part of it. If you're at the earliest stage of the learning curve, start by reading technology-oriented columns and articles in magazines, newspapers and websites that are written for a general audience. Move up to more tech-oriented e-letters as you build a foundation. As you come across new tells, look them up online. Definitions at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written and edited by web users, may be helpful. You should also start associating with people who can help explain things. Look for groups that sponsor seminars or find a supportive online community. Don't be afraid to guide your helper. Explain what you need to know, ask him or her to slow down and speak in basic terms.
单选题For many years, any discussion of reparations to compensate the descendants of African slaves for 246 years of bondage and another century of legalized discrimination was dismissed. Many whites and blacks alike scoffed at the idea, reasoning that slavery is part of the past that would only unleash new demons if it were resurrected. Opponents contend that the fledgling reparations movement overlooks many important facts. First, they assert, reparations usually are paid to direct victims, as was the case when the U. S. government apologized and paid compensation to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. Similarly, Holocaust (;k2,V~-~,) survivors have received payments from the Germans. In addition, not all blacks were slaves, and an estimated 3,000 were slave owners. Also, many immigrants not only came to the United States after slavery ended, but they also faced discrimination. Should they pay reparations, too? Or should they receive them? And regardless of how much slave labor contributed to the United States' wealth, opponents contend, blacks benefit from that wealth today. As a group, African-Americans are the best educated, wealthiest blacks on the planet. But that attitude is slowly changing. At least 10 cities, including Chicago, Detroit and Washington, have passed resolutions in the past two years urging federal hearings into the impact of slavery. Mainstream civil rights groups such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference regularly raise the issue. The surging interest in reparations parallels a heightened sensitivity to the horrors of slavery, in which as many as 6 million Africans perished in the journey to the Americas alone. There also is growing attention being paid to the huge economic bounty that slavery created for private companies and the country as a whole. Earlier this year, Aetna Inc. apologized for selling insurance policies that compensated slave owners for financial losses when their slaves died. Last summer, the Hartford Courant in Connecticut printed a front-page apology for the profits it made from running ads for the sale of slaves and the capture of runaways. Next month, a new California law will require insurance companies to disclose any slave insurance policies they may have issued. The state also is requiring University of California officials to assemble a team of scholars to research the history of slavery and report how current California businesses benefited. Proponents of reparations argue that, even for nearly a century after emancipation in 1865, blacks legally were still excluded from the opportunities that became the cornerstones for the white middle-class.
单选题What can be inferred from the passage?
单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following four
texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your
answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.{{B}}Text 1{{/B}}
The author of some forty novels,
a number of plays, volumes of verse, historical, critical and
autobiographical works, an editor and translator, Jack Lindsay is clearly an
extraordinarily prolific writer--a fact which can easily obscure his very real
distinction in some of the areas into which he bas ventured. His co
editorship of Vision in Sydney in the early 1920's, for example, is still felt
to have introduced a significant period in Australian culture, while his study
of Kickens written in 1950 is highly regarded. But of all his work it is
probably the novel to which he has made his most significant
contribution. Since 1936 when, to use his own words in
Fanfrolico and after, he "reached bedrock", Lindsay bas maintained a consistent
Marxist viewpoint--and it is this viewpoint which if nothing else has guaranteed
his novels a minor but certainly not negligible place in modern British
literature. Feeling that "the historical novel is a form that bas a limitless
future as a fighting weapon and as a cultural instrument" (New Masses, January
1937), Lindsay first attempted to formulate his Marxist convictions in fiction
mainly set in the past: particularly in his trilogy in English novels--1949
(dealing with the Digger and Leveller movements), Lost Birthright (the Wilkesite
agitations), and Men of Forth-Eight (written in 1939, the Chartist and
revolutionary uprisings in Europe). Basically these works set out, with most
success in the first volume, to vivify the historical traditions behind English
Socialism and attempted to demonstrate that it stood, in Lindsay's words, for
the "true completion of the national destiny." Although the war
years saw the virtual disintegration of the left-wing writing movement of the
1930s, Lindsay himself carried on: delving into contemporary affairs in We Shall
Return and Beyond Terror, novels in which the epithets formerly reserved for the
evil capitalists or Franco's soldiers have been transferred rather crudely to
the German troops. After the war, Lindsay continued to write mainly about the
present--trying with varying degrees of success to come to terms with the
unradical political realities of post-war England. In the series of novels known
collectively as The British Way, and beginning with Betrayed Spring in 1953, it
seemed at first as if his solution was simply to resort to more and more obvious
authorial manipulation and heavy-banded didacticism. Fortunately, however, from
Revolt of the Sons, this process was reversed, as Lindsay began to show an
increasing tendency to ignore party solutions, to fail indeed to give anything
but the most elementary political consciousness to his characters, so that in
his latest (and what appears to be his last) contemporary novel, Choice of
Times, his hero, Colin, ends on a note of desperation: "Everything must be
different, I can't live this way any longer. But how can I change it, how?" To
his credit as an artist, Lindsay doesn't give him any explicit
answer.
单选题The question of parenting has become of increasing interest to economists. At the American Economic Association"s annual meeting in Denver this year, for example, there was a
1
on the effect of mothers" employment on their children, as well as household
2
and child development.
Economists are
3
increasingly on studies from epigenetics, which demonstrate the way parenting and other
4
factors transform genes. But
5
most debates regarding nature
6
nurture tend to look at what happens to people during childhood, Janet Currie, an economist at Columbia University, has looked at the effects that
7
might have on children even before they are born.
In a paper
8
as the Richard T. Ely lecture at the A. E. A. meeting, she reviewed studies looking at
9
better maternal education and government food
10
can help raise birth weights among babies, an indicator that can
11
future health. Stopping smoking or taking drugs, not
12
, also improves birth weights.
In examining the effects of pollution on birth weight, she
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that one of the reasons poor, minority mothers tend to live
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to polluted areas is that such neighborhoods tend to be viewed as blighted by more
15
and white residents, and that
16
home prices or rents are more
17
for those living on low incomes. She also posited the
18
that "some groups are less able to process and act on information about hazards."
Ms. Currie
19
that because changes made by mothers or families while a baby is in the womb can affect birth weight, and in
20
, future health, "we cannot assume that differences that are present at birth reflect unchangeable, genetic factors."