单选题The scientific experiment about monkeys indicates that the author thinks

单选题From the first sentence of the passage, we learn that______

单选题Money has become plastic in the age of the credit card, but in an increasing number of countries, cash really is becoming plastic. After more than 300 years in (1) , the traditional paper banknote is gradually being (2) by new polymer technology. Note Printing Australia (NPA), a wholly (3) subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia, is (4) the only company in the world making plastic money, and it is (5) on an aggressive strategy to (6) more countries to its cause. The (7) of plastic notes are considerable. They cost about twice as much as paper notes but (8) four to five times as long--Australia's $ 10 paper note had a(n) (9) life of eight months but plastic lasts at least 30 months. In Papua New Guinea the 2 kina (54 cents) paper note lasted only four months but its plastic (10) lasts 24 months. This increased life (11) is particularly important in Asia where environmental conditions (12) humidity drastically reduce the life of a paper note. Plastic notes also cause 38% fewer paper jams in ATMs. But the real (13) point is that plastic notes are very hard to counterfeit. With increased (14) to computer scanners and printers, even schoolchildren can now (15) . good quality counterfeit paper notes. According to the U. S. Secret Service, which is in (16) of the security of U. S. banknotes, the $ 100 bill is the most counterfeited note in the world. The $ 100 bill (17) for 65% of the $ 500 billion (18) of U. S. banknotes in circulation, and an (19) 487,000 of these notes are fake--about 150 fakes per million notes. In Australia there are (20) about three fakes per million notes.

单选题Even in an era of global networks and cheap travel, international communication still faces one great barrier: we don't all speak the same language. But that gap is (1) as online translation services advance. Recently (2) website Meedan translates Arabic-language news stories into English, and vice versa, and displays the two versions (3) each other. Comments in either language are (4) translated. A new site for bloggers, called Mojofiti, automatically makes posts (5) to readers in 27 languages. And Google now has a tool that will (6) allow anyone with a camera-phone to photograph, say, a German restaurant menu, send the (7) as a multimedia message to Google's servers, and get an English translation sent back to them. All these services ultimately (8) a technique called statistical machine translation, in which software learns to translate by using mathematics to (9) large collections of previously translated documents. It then uses the (10) it has learned this way to (11) the most likely translation in future. (12) translation procedures have improved, some human (13) is still needed to provide a translation that reads well. Meedan's news articles, (14) , are machine translated and then tidied up by editors. Google's Toolkit for professional translators produces a machine translation for them to tidy up, in the process providing (15) to the software to improve its translation (16) With the fight help even a monoglot user (someone that speaks only a single language) could produce resuits as good as those of a (17) , says Philip Koehn of the University of Edinburgh, UK. His service, Caitra, (18) several possible phrases if it is uncertain which one is correct. This lets a monoglot user fix confusing phrases that would (19) be impossible without reading the (20)

单选题The underlined word "breached" in the last sentence of the text could best be replaced by

单选题"escape from"(Line 6, Para. 1) can be substituted for

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Feeling anxious? Your mood may actually change how your dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavors recede, according to new research. This link between the chemical balance in your brain and your sense of taste could one day help doctors to treat depression. There are currently no on-the-spot tests for deciding which medication will work best in individual patients with this condition. Researchers hope that a test based on flavor detection could help doctors to get more prescriptions right first time. It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower-than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both. Many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry. To unpick the relationship between the two, Lucy Donaldson and her colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes. The drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, the team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience. The other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes. In healthy people, volunteers whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes. "What hasn't been done be{ore is to look precisely at which tastes are affected in depression," says Donaldson. Now the results are in, "we can discriminate between the chemicals and the tastes that seem to be altered," she says. Testing sensitivity to sweet and sour tastes could potentially help doctors to pick up on which chemicals are dipping, guiding them when choosing which drug to rectify the problem. Currently, doctors rely on physical and emotional symptoms to make a best guess at an individual's imbalance, prescribe a drug and wait about a month to check on any improvement. Good doctors have about a 60-80% success rate in selecting the right drug the first time, says psychiatrist Jan Melichar, a co-author on the paper. Are there any decent tests for prescribing drugs for depression? "No. We do a best guesstimate," says Melichar. "I'm excited by this finding because in 3, 5 or 7 years we could have a simple taste test. " Next, the team plans to perform similar tests in depressed people, and in healthy volunteers given another brain chemical called tryptophan. This chemical would lower the healthy subjects' levels of serotonin, as actually happens in depressed patients. The work has also generated interest from flavor houses--companies that develop chemicals for the food and drink industry--who are interested in making foods taste just as sweet with half the amount of sugar. "Theoretically there would be the possibility of enhancing your meal with drugs that affect brain chemicals so that things would taste better--you couid have a 'designer taste tablet'," Donaldson says.

单选题Over the last decade, demand for the most common cosmetic surgery procedures, like greatest enlargements and most jobs, has increased by more than 400 percent. According to Dr. Dai Davies, of the Plastic Surgery Partnership in Hammersmith, the majority of cosmetic surgery patients are not chasing physical perfection. Rather, they are driven to fantastic lengths to improve their appearance by a desire to look normal. "What we all crave is to look normal, and normal is what is prescribed by the advertising media and other external pressures. They give us a perception of what is physically acceptable and we feel we must look like that. " In America, the debate is no longer about whether surgery is normal; rather, it centers on what age people should be before going under the knife. New York surgeon Dr. Gerard Amber recommends "maintenance" work for people in their thirties. "The idea of waiting until one needs heroic transformation is silly, " he says, "By then, you"ve wasted 20 great years of your life and allowed things to get out of hand. " Dr. Imber draws the line at operation on people who are under 18, however. "It seems that someone we don"t consider old enough to order a drink shouldn"t be considering plastic surgery. " In the UK cosmetic surgery has long been seen as the exclusive domain of the very rich and famous. But the proportionate cost of treatment has fallen substantially, bringing all but the most advanced laser technology within the reach of most people. Dr. Davies, who claims to "eater for the average person", agrees. He says, "I treat a few of the rich and famous and an awful lot of secretaries. Of course, ￡ 3,000 for an operation is a lot of money. But it is also an investment for life which costs about half the price of a good family holiday. " Dr. Davies suspects that the increasing sophistication of the fat injecting and removal techniques that allow patients to be treated with a local anesthetic in an afternoon has also helped promote the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Yet, as one woman who, recently paid ￡ 2,500 for liposuction to remove fat from her thighs admitted, the slope to becoming a cosmetic surgery veteran is a deceptively gentle one. "I had my legs done because they"d been bugging me for years. But going into the clinic was so low key and effective it whetted my appetite. Now I don"t think there"s any operation that I would rule out having if I could afford it. "

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Women, according to Chairman Mao, hold up half the sky—but {{U}}in California some are better rewarded for this effort than others.{{/U}} According to a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California, Asian women born in the United States outstrip all their sisters in terms of earning power. The average hourly wage for American-born Asian ladies in 2001 (the latest year with reliable figures) was $19.30, with American-born whites coming next. On the bottom rungs of the ladder came Latinas: if born abroad, they earned a mere $10.40 an hour (though this was comfortably above California's then $6.25 minimum wage); if born in America, they managed $15.10 an hour. Education is the biggest reason for the ethnic disparities. Some 55% of California's American-born Asian women have at least a bachelor's degree, and an impressive 84% of them either have jobs or are looking for them. By contrast, only 14% of American-born Hispanic women have a bachelor's degree and only 74% of them are in the labour market. Meanwhile, Latinas born abroad are often condemned to low-paying jobs by an even inefficient education or a poor knowledge of English. Much the same can be said of Asian women born in South-East Asia, a category that includes refugees from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The institute calculates that they earned an average of $15.80, almost $1 less than other foreign-born Asians. But education is not the only factor in play for California's women. Larger families make it more difficult for Latinas to go out to work in the first place; blacks often live too far away to commute to well-paid jobs; and just as Asians may benefit from high expectations, so other groups may suffer from low ones. The institute makes an attempt, heroic or politically correct, to adjust for such factors, imagining, for example, that a foreign-born Latina has the same family structure, education and place of residence as the average Californian woman. That brings the average wage for foreign-born Latinas up to a more respectable $15.20; yet American-born Asians still {{U}}rule the roost{{/U}}. But before the golden girls get too happy, the institute reckons that Californian women of all sorts tend to earn roughly 20% less than their menfolk do.

单选题Millions of dollars often depend on the choice of which commercial to use in launching a new product. So you show the commercials to a 1 of typical consumers and ask their opinion. The answers you get can sometimes lead you into a big 2 . Respondents may lie just to be polite. Now some companies and major advertising 3 have been hiring voice detectives who test your normal voice and then record you on tape 4 commenting on a product. A computer analyzes the degree and direction of change 5 normal. One kind of divergence of pitch means the subject 6 . Another kind means he was really enthusiastic. In a testing of two commercials 7 children, they were, vocally, about equally 8 of both, but the computer reported their emotional 9 in the two was totally different. Most major commercials are sent for testing to theaters 10 with various electronic measuring devices. People regarded as 11 are brought in off the street. Viewers can push buttons to 12 whether they are interested or bored. Newspaper and magazine groups became intensely interested in testing their ads for a product 13 TV ads for the same product. They were interested because the main 14 of evidence shows that people 15 a lot more mental activity when they read 16 when they sit in front of the TV set. TV began to be 17 "a low-involvement" 18 . It is contended that low involvement means that there is less 19 that the ad message will be 20 .

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Yasuhisa Shizoki, a 51-year-old MP from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), starts tapping his finger on the dismal economic chart on his coffee table. "Unless we change the decision-making process," he says bluntly, "we are not going to be able to solve this kind of problem." With the economy in such a mess, it may seem a bit of a diversion to be trying to sort out Japan's political structures as well as its economic problems. But Mr Shiozaki can hardly be accused of time-wasting. He has consistently prodded the government to take a firm hand to ailing banks, and has given warning against complacency after a recent rise in share prices. Far from being a distraction, his latest cause highlights how far Japan is from genuine economic reform. Since cowriting a report on political reform, which was released by an LDP panel last week, Mr Shiozaki has further upset the party's old guard. Its legionaries, flanked by columns of the bureaucracy, continue to hamper most attempts to overhaul the economy. Junichiro Koizumi was supposed to change all that, by going over their heads and appealing directly to the public. Yet nearly a year after becoming prime minister, Mr Koizumi has precious little to show for his efforts. His popularity is now flagging and his determination is increasingly in doubt. As hopes of immediate economic reform fade, optimists are focusing on another potential benefit of Mr Koizumi's tenure. They hope that his highly personalized style of leadership will pave the way for a permanent change in Japanese politics, towards more united and authoritative cabinets that are held directly accountable for their policies. As that happens, the thinking goes, real economic reforms will be able to follow. A leading candidate for change is the 40-year-old system--informal but religiously followed--through which the LDP machinery vets every bill before it ever gets to parliament. Most legislation starts in the LDP's party committees, which mirror the parliamentary committee structure. Proposals then go through two higher LDP bodies, which hammer out political deals to smooth their passage. Only then does the prime minister's cabinet get fully involved in approving the policy. Most issues have been decided by the LDP mandarins long before they reach this point, let alone the floor of parliament, leaving even the prime minister limited influence, and allowing precious little room for public debate and even less for accountability. As a result, progress will probably remain slow. Since they know that political reform leads to economic reform, and hence poses a threat to their interests, most of the LDP will resist any real changes. But at least a handful of insiders have now bought into one of Mr Koizumi's best slogans. "Change the LDP, change Japan."

单选题The main point of the text is that______.

单选题Google already has a window into our souls through our Internet searches and it now has insight into our ailing bodies too. The Internet giant is using its vast database of individual search terms to (1) the emergence of flu up to two weeks (2) government epidemiologists. Google Flu Trends uses the (3) of people to seek online help for their health problems. By tracking (4) for terms such as "cough", "fever" and "aches and pains", it claims to be able to (5) estimate where flu is (6) . Google tested the idea in nine regions of the US and found it could accurately predict flu (7) between 7 and 14 days earlier than the federal centres for disease control and prevention. Google hopes the idea could also be used to help (8) other diseases. Flu Trends is limited (9) the US. Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebb. Two software engineers (10) in the project, said that (11) in Google search queries can be very (12) . In a blog post on the project they wrote: "It turns (13) that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1 to 2 weeks to collect and (14) surveillance data but Google search queries can be (15) counted very quickly. By making our estimates (16) each day, Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza." They explained that (17) information health would be kept (18) . "Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users (19) we rely on anonymised, aggregated counts of how of ten certain search queries (20) each week./