单选题A simple pair of pants may contain a multitude of meanings. In the 1850s, jeans were the unemotional, durable dress of those that came to California to labor in the gold fields. Seams were strengthened with metal pins to make them hold, a technology borrowed from the construction of horse blankets. Cloth for beasts of burden was translated to the needs of men of burden. These were the clothes of hard-laboring people, and these pants held little promise for the men who wore them, save the promise that they would be ready for the next day's labors. During the same decade, in the court of one European queen, "the gown worn by a fashionable lady in attendance contained 1,100 yards of material not including lace and other ornaments." American women of wealth were also wrapped in an abundance of cloth. While makers of jeans worried over how many men could be fitted into a given amount of cloth, for women of wealth the concern was with how many yards of cloth could be attractively arranged upon a given individual. This was the mark of prosperity: to wear enough material on one's back to clothe many of more modest means. The fashionable rich could not imagine themselves wearing the vulgar canvas pants of workers and "peasants". Neither could working-class people reasonably imagine themselves in the costumes of wealth and power. Tile only fashion link between them— subtle at best—was the stern top hat of wealthy capitalists, a coal-black cylinder symbolizing the factory chimney pipes that brought profit to one, hardship to the other. Blue jeans only signified labor and sweat. Years later, the clothing of nineteenth-century laborers would assume new and different meanings. Humble beginnings became increasingly obscure within the unfolding of popular culture. In the movies, the horse riders of the early cattle industry were reborn as symbols of a noble, rural simplicity, and blue jeans became conspicuous within the landscape of the American media. On the screen these pants teased the imaginations of city folk, who longed for a simpler and less corrupt life. While laborers would continue to wear them at work, now the well-off might put on a pair at home or in the garden—an escape from the discipline of the business world. In the 1950s, blue jeans became a statement by those who wished to boycott the values of a consumer-based society that was concerned only with acquisition. Blue-jeans-wearing rebels of popular movies were an expression of contempt towards the empty and obedient silence of Cold-War America; the positive images of American consumer society were under siege. What had been a piece of traditional American culture—blue jeans—became a rejection of traditional culture.

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}} According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. According to Alexa, the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide {{U}}traffic{{/U}}, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 5th. Quantcast ranks the website 15th in U.S. in terms of traffic, and Compete. com ranks it 14th in U.S. The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances. But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months. And now, Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as "they" or "themself." "We've gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles," Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit said in a company statement. In English, when users fail to specify what gender they are, Facebook defaults to some form of the gender neutral, plural pronoun "they." That option is unavailable when the plural is always masculine or feminine in other languages. "People who haven't selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex," Gleit wrote. Unless the gender of the user is clear, Facebook does not know which pronoun to use to notify other members add information to the site. This common English problem is multiplied in languages where masculine and feminine distinctions are grammatically ingrained. The site will now ask users to specify whether they are male or female on their basic member- ship profile. It will prompt existing users to define themselves. Facebook has an opt-out option for members who choose not to specify their gender or do not consider gender to be clear cut. Members can remove mention of gender from messages about their activities. "We've received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting," Gleit said.

单选题For more than two decades, U.S. courts have been limiting affirmative-action programs in universities and other areas. The legal rationale is that racial preferences are unconstitutional, even those intended to compensate for racism or intolerance. For many colleges, this means students can be admitted only on merit, not on their race or ethnicity. It has been a divisive issue across the U. S., as educators blame the prolonged reaction to affirmative-action for declines in minority admissions. Meanwhile, activists continue to battle race preferences in courts from Michigan to North Carolina. Now chief executives of about two dozen companies have decided to plunge headfirst into this politically unsettled debate. They, together with 36 universities and 7 non-profitable organizations, formed a forum that set forth an action plan essentially designed to help colleges circumvent court-imposed restrictions on affirmative action. The CEOs' motive: "Our audience is growing more diverse, so the communities we serve benefit if our employees are racially and ethnically diverse" as well, says one CEO of a company that owns nine television stations. Among the steps the form is pushing: finding creative yet legal ways to boost minority enrollment through new admissions policies; promoting admissions decisions that look at more than test scores; and encouraging universities to step up their minority outreach and financial aid. And to counter accusations by critics to challenge these tactics in court, the group says it will give legal assistance to colleges sued for trying them. "Diversity diminished by the court must be made up for in other legitimate, legal ways," says a forum member. One of the more controversial methods advocated is the so-called 10% rule. The idea is for public universities--which educate three-quarters of all U. S. undergraduates--to admit students Who are in the top 10% of their high school graduating class. Doing so allows colleges to take minorities who excel in average urban schools, even if they wouldn't have made the cut under the current statewide ranking many universities use.

单选题Which of the following is excluded in a symptom of organophosphate poisoning?______

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. The communications explosion is on the scale of the rail, automobile or telephone revolution. Very soon you'll be able to record your entire life{{U}} (1) {{/U}}—anything a microphone or a camera can sense you' Il be able to{{U}} (2) {{/U}}. In particular, the number of images a person captures in a lifetime is set to rise exponentially. The thousand{{U}} (3) {{/U}}a year I take of my children on a digital camera are all precious to me.{{U}} (4) {{/U}}a generation' s time, my children' s children will have total image documentation of their entire lives—a{{U}} (5) {{/U}}log of tremendous personal value. By then we'll be wrestling with another question: how we control all the electronic{{U}} (6) {{/U}}connected to the internet: trillions of PCs, laptops, cell phones and other gadgets. In Cambridge, we're already working{{U}} (7) {{/U}}millimetre-square computing and sensing devices that can be linked to the internet through the radio network. This sort of{{U}} (8) {{/U}}will expand dramatically{{U}} (9) {{/U}}microscopic communications devices become dirt-cheap and multiply. Just imagine{{U}} (10) {{/U}}the paint on the wall could do if it had this sort of communications dust in it: change colour, play music, show movies or even speak to you. {{U}} (11) {{/U}}costs raise other possibilities too.{{U}} (12) {{/U}}launching space vehicles is about to become very much cheaper, the number of satellites is likely to go up exponentially. There' s lots of{{U}} (13) {{/U}}up there so we could have millions of them. And if you have millions of loworbit satellites, you can establish a{{U}} (14) {{/U}}communications network that completely does away with towers and masts. If the satellites worked on the cellular principle so you got spatial reuse of frequencies, system{{U}} (15) {{/U}}would be amazing. Speech is so{{U}} (16) {{/U}}that I expect voice communication to become almost free eventually: you' 11 pay just a monthly fixed{{U}} (17) {{/U}}and be able to make as many calls as you want. By then people will also have fixed links with business{{U}} (18) {{/U}}, friends and relatives. One day I{{U}} (19) {{/U}}being able to keep in touch with my family in Poland on a fibreoptic audio-video{{U}} (20) {{/U}}; we'll be able to have a little ceremony at supper-time, open the curtains and sit down "together" to eat.

单选题Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas. Just off Singing Hills Road, in one of hundreds of two-story homes dotting a former cattle ranch beyond the southern fringes of Denver, Phil Boyle and his family openly wonder if they will have to move close to town to get some relief. They still revel in the space and quiet that has drawn a steady exodus from American cities toward places like this for more than half a century. But life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. Mr. Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $ 4 a gallon, Mr. Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel fuel. In March, the last time he filled his propane tank to heat his spacious house, he paid $ 566, more than twice the price of 5 years ago. Though Mr. Boyle finds city life unappealing, it is now up for reconsideration. "Living closer in, in a smaller space, where you don't have that commute," he said, "It's definitely something we talk about. Before it was'we spend too much time driving.' Now, it's 'we spend too much time and money driving.' " Across the nation, the realization is taking hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a change with lasting consequences. The shift to costlier fuel is threatening to slow the decades-old migration away from cities, while exacerbating the 'housing downturn by diminishing the appeal of larger homes set far from urban jobs. In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody's Economy. com. In Denver, housing prices in the urban core rose steadily from 2003 until late last year compared with previous years, before dipping nearly 5 percent in the last three months of last year, according to Economy. com. But house prices in the suburbs began falling earlier, in the middle of 2006, and then accelerated, dropping by 7 percent during the last three months of the year from a year earlier. Many factors have propelled the unraveling of American real estate, from the mortgage crisis to a staggering excess of home construction. But economists and real estate agents are growing convinced that the rising cost of energy is now a primary factor pushing home prices down in the suburbs. More than three-fourths of prospective home buyers are now more inclined to live in an urban area because of fuel prices, according to a recent survey of 903 real estate agents with Coldwell Banker, the national brokerage firm.

单选题The word "counterproductive" ( Line 3, Paragraph 4) probably means

单选题The author regards the notion that heat pumps have a genuine drawback as a

单选题Toward the novel literary idea, the author% attitude seems to be that of

单选题From the fifth paragraph we may infer that Anorexia and Bulimia are

单选题By saying "The benefits are not to be sneezed at" (Line 1, Paragraph 4) , the author means

单选题When mentioning "the something-for-nothing days" (Paragraph 2), the writer is talking about ______.

单选题One of the recent, important changes in higher education relates to