单选题 {{B}}Directions: {{/B}} In this part there are ten incomplete sentences, each with four suggested answers. Choose the one that you think is the best answer. Mark your answer on the {{B}}ANSWER SHEET{{/B}} by drawing with a pencil a short bar across the corresponding letter in the brackets.

单选题When families gather for Christmas dinner, some will stick to formal traditions dating back to Grandma"s generation. Their tables will be set with the good dishes and silver, and the dress code will be Sunday-best. But in many other homes, this china-and-silver elegance has given way to a stoneware-and-stainless informality, with dresses assuming an equally casual-Friday look. For hosts and guests, the change means greater simplicity and comfort. For makers of fine china in Britain, it spells economic hard times. Last week Royal Doulton, the largest employer in Stoke-on-Trent, announced that it is eliminating 1,000 jobs—one-fifth of its total workforce. That brings to more than 4,000 the number of positions lost in 18 months in the pottery region. Wedgwood and other pottery factories made cuts earlier. Although a strong pound and weak markets in Asia play a role in the downsizing, the layoffs is Stoke have their roots in earthshaking social shifts. A spokesman for Royal Doulton admitted that the company "has been somewhat slow in catching up with the trend" to- ward casual dining. Families eat together less often, he explained, and more people eat alone, either because they are single or they eat in front of television. Even dinner parties, if they happen at all, have gone casual. In a time of long work hours and demanding family schedules, busy hosts insist, rightly, that it"s better to share a takeout pizza on paper plates in the family room than to wait for the perfect moment or a "real" dinner party. Too often, the perfect moment never comes. Iron a fine-patterned tablecloth? Forget it. Polish the silver? Who has time? Yet the loss of formality has its down side. The fine points of etiquette (礼节) that children might once have learned at the table by observation or instruction from parents and grandparents ("Chew with your mouth closed." "Keep your elbows off the table.") must be picked up elsewhere. Some companies now offer etiquette seminars for employees who may be competent professionally but clueless socially.

单选题If you know exactly what you want, the best route to a job is to get specialized training. A recent survey shows that companieslike the graduates in such fields as business and health care who can go to work immediately with very little on-the-job training. That's especially true of booming fields that are challenging for workers. At Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, for example, bachelor's degree graduates get an average of four or five job offers with salaries ranging from the high teens to the low 20s and plenty of chances for rapid advancement. Large companies, especially, like a background of formal education coupled with work experience. But in the long run, too much specialization doesn't pay off. Business, which has been flooded with MBAs, no longer considers the degree an automatic stamp of approval. The MBA may open doors and command a higher salary initially, but the impact of a degree washes out after five years. As further evidence of the erosion of corporate faith in specialized degrees, Michigan State's Scheetz cites a pattern in corporate hiring practices. Although companies tend to take on specialists as new hires, they often seek out generalists for middle-and upper-level management. "They want someone who isn't constrained by nuts and bolts to look at the big picture," says Scheetz. This sounds suspiciously like a formal statement that you approve of the liberal-arts graduate. Time and again labor-market analysts mention a need for talents that liberal-arts majors are assumed to have: writing and communication skills, organizational skills, open-mindedness and adapt-ability, and the ability to analyze and solve problems. David Birch claims he does not hire anybody with an MBA or an engineering degree. "I hire only liberal-arts people because they have a less-than-canned way of doing things," says Birch. Liberal-arts means an academically thorough and strict program that includes literature, history, mathematics, economics, science, human behavior—plus a computer course or two. With that under your belt, you can feel free to specialize. "A liberal-arts degree coupled with an MBA or some other technical training is a very good combination in the marketplace," says Scheetz.

单选题Most people have come to realize that it is about time the government ______further measures to control the population.

单选题Teacher: Richard, class begins at 9, and you are late. Student: I know, but I missed my bus. I'm sorry. Teacher: ______. You have to be here on time. A. Don't mention it B. That's no excuse C. You needn't be D. No problem

单选题Too often young people get themselves employed quite by accident, not knowing what lies in the way of opportunity for promotion, happiness and security. As a result, they are employed doing jobs that afford them little or no satisfaction. Our school leavers face so much competition that they seldom care what they do as long as they can earn a living. Some stay long at a job and learn to like it; others quit from one to another looking for something to suit them. The young graduates who leave the university look for jobs that offer a salary up to their expectation. Very few go out into the world knowing exactly what they want and realizing their own abilities. The reason behind all this confusion is that there never has been a proper vocational guidance in our educational institution. Nearly all grope (摸索) in the dark and their chief concern when they look for a job is to ask what salary is like. They never bother to think whether they are suited for the job or, even more important, whether the job suits them. Having a job is more than merely providing yourself and your dependants with daily bread and some money for leisure and entertainment. It sets a pattern of life and, in many ways, determines social status in life, selection of friends, leisure and interest. In choosing a career you should' first consider the type of work which will suit your interest. Nothing is more pathetic than taking on a job in which you have no interest, for it will not only discourage your desire to succeed in life but also ruin your talents and ultimately make you an emotional wreck (受到严重伤害的人) and a bitter person.

单选题In 1993, New York State ordered stores to charge a deposit on beverage (饮料) containers. Within a year, consumers had returned millions of aluminum cans and glass and plastic bottles. Plenty of companies were eager to accept the aluminum and glass as raw materials for new products. But because few could figure out what to do with the plastic, much of it wound up buried in landfills (垃圾填埋场). The problem was not limited to New York. Unfortunately, there were too few uses for second-hand plastic. Today, one out of five plastic soda bottles is recycled (回收利用) in the United States. The reason for the change is that now there are dozens of companies across the country buying discarded plastic soda bottles and turning them into fence posts, paint brushes, etc. As the New York experience shows, recycling involves more than simply separating valuable materials from the rest of the rubbish. A discard remains a discard until somebody figures out how to give it a second life—and until economic arrangements exist to give that second life value. Without adequate markets to absorb materials collected for recycling, throwaways actually depress prices for used materials. Shrinking landfill space, and rising costs for burying and burning rubbish are forcing local governments to look more closely at recycling. In many areas, the East Coast especially, recycling is already the least expensive wastemanagement option. For every ton of waste recycled, a city avoids paying for its disposal, which, in parts of New York, amounts to saving of more than $ 100 per ton. Recycling also stimulates the local economy by creating jobs and trims the pollution control and energy costs of industries that make recycled products by giving them a more refined raw material. (287 words)

单选题Passage 1 Lead deposits, which accumulated in soil and snow during the 1960's and 70's, were primarily the result of leaded gasoline emissions originating in the United States. In the twenty years that the Clean Air Act has mandated unleaded gas use in the United States, the lead accumulation worldwide has decreased significantly. A study published recently in the journal Nature shows that air-borne leaded gas emissions from the United States were the leading contributor to the high concentration of lead in the snow in Greenland. The new study is a result of the continued research led by Dr. Charles Boutron, an expert on the impact of heavy metals on the environment at the National Center for Scientific Research in France. A study by Dr. Boutron published in 1991 showed that lead levels in arctic (北极的) snow were declining. In his new study, Dr. Boutron found the ratios of the different forms of lead in the leaded gasoline used in the United States were different from the ratios of European, Asian and Canadian gasolines and thus enabled scientists to differentiate the lead sources. The dominant lead ratio found in Greenland snow matched that found ingasoline from the United States. In a study published in the journal Ambio, scientists found that levels in soil in the Northeastern United States had decreased markedly since the introduction of unleaded gasoline. Many scientists had believed that the lead would stay in soil and snow for a longer period. The authors of the Ambio study examined samples of the upper layers of soil taken from the same sites of 30 forest floors in New England, New York and Pennsylvania in 1980 and in 1990. The forest environment processed and redistributed the lead faster than the scientists had expected. Scientists say both studies demonstrate that certain parts of the ecosystem respond rapidly to reductions in atmospheric pollution, but that these findings should not be used as a license to pollute.

单选题They have ______ production.

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单选题While still in its early stages, welfare reform has already been judged a great success in many states, at least in getting people off welfare. It's estimated that more than 2 million people have left the rolls since 1994. In the past four years, welfare rolls in Athens County have been cut in half. But 70 percent of the people who left in the past two years took jobs that paid less than $6 an hour. The result: The Athens County poverty rate still remains at more than 30 percent--twice the national average. For advocates (代言人) for the poor, that's an indication much more needs to be done. "More people are getting jobs, but it's not making their lives any better," says Kathy Lairn, a policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. A center analysis of U.S. Census data nationwide found that between 1995 and 1996, a greater percentage of single, female-headed households were earning money on their own, but that average income for these households actually went down. But for many, the fact that poor people are able to support themselves almost as well without government aid as they did with it is in itself a huge victory. "Welfare was a poison. It was a toxin (毒素)that was poisoning the family," says Robert Rector, a welfare-reform policy analyst. "The reform is changing the moral climate in low-income communities. It's beginning to rebuild the work ethic (道德观), which is much more important." Mr. Rector and others argued that once "the habit of dependency is cracked", then the country can make other policy changes aimed at improving living standards.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} Hunting for a job late last year, lawyer Cant Redmon stumbled across CareerBuilder, a job database on the Internet. He searched it with no success but was attracted by the site's "personal search agent". It's an interactive feature that lets visitors key in job criteria such as location, title, and salary, then E-mails them when a matching position is posted in the database. Redmon chose the keywords legal, intellectual property, and Washington, D. C. Three weeks later, he got his first notification of an opening. "I struck gold," says Redmon, who E-mailed his resume to the employer and won a position as in-house counsel for a company. With thousands of career-related sites on the Internet, finding promising openings can be time-consuming and inefficient. Search agents reduce the need for repeated visits to the databases. But although a search agent worked for Redmon, career experts see drawbacks. Narrowing your criteria, for example, may work against you: "Every time you answer a question you eliminate a possibility." says one expert. For any job search, you should Start with a narrow concept—what you think you want to do—then broaden it. "None of these programs do that," says another expert. "There's no career counseling implicit in all of this." Instead, the best strategy is to use the agent as a kind of tip service to keep abreast of jobs in a particular database; when you get E-mail, consider it a reminder to check the database again. "I would not rely on agents for finding everything that is added to a database that might interest me," says the author of a job-searching guide. Some sites design their agents to tempt job hunters to return. When Career Site's agent sends out messages to those who have signed up for its service, for example, it includes only three potential jobs—those it considers the best matches. There may be more matches in the database; job hunters will have to visit the site again to find them and they do. "On the day after we send our messages, we see a sharp increase in our traffic," says Seth Peets, vice president of marketing for Career Site. Even those who aren't hunting for jobs may find search agents worthwhile. Some use them to keep a close watch on the demand for their line of work or gather information on compensation to ann themselves when negotiating for a raise. Although happily employed, Redmon maintains his agent at Career Builder. "You always keep your eyes open," he says. Working with a personal search agent means having another set of eyes looking out for you.

单选题He hoped the firm would______ him to the Paris branch.

单选题The driver carefully checked his car ______ it should go wrong on the way. A. lest B. or else C. so that D. in order that

单选题in spite of "endless talk of, difference," American society is an amazing machine for homogenizing people. This is "the democratizing uniformity of dress and discourse, and the casualness and absence of consumption" launched by the 19th century department stores that offered vast arrays of goods in an elegant atmosphere. Instead of intimate shops catering to a knowledgeable elite, "these were stores, anyone could enter, regardless of class or background D. This turned shopping into a public and democratic act. The mass media, advertising and sports are other forces for homogenization. Immigrants are quickly fitting into this common culture, which may not be altogether elevating but is hardly poisonous. Writing for the National Immigration Forum, Gregory Rodriguez reports that today% im- migration is neither at unprecedented level nor resistant to assimilation. In 1998 immigrants were 9.8 percent of population; in 1900, 13.6 percent. In the 10 years prior to 1990, 3. 1 hnmigrants arrived for every 1,000 residents; in the 10 years prior to 1890, 9.2 for every 1,000. Now, consider three indices of assimilation—language, home ownership and intermarriage. The 1990 Census revealed that "a majority of immigrants from each of the fifteen most common countries of origin spoke English "well "or" very well "after ten years of residence. ' The children of immigrants tend to be bilingual and proficient in English. "By the third generation, the original language is lost in the majority of immigrant families." Hence the description of America as a graveyard" for language". By 1996 foreign-born immigrants who had arrive before 1970 had a home ownership rate of 75. 6 percent, higher than the 69. 8 per- cent rate among native-born Americans. Foreign-born Asians and Hispanics "have higher rates of intermarriage than do U. S born whites and blacks." By the third generation, one third of Hispanic women are married to non-Hispanics, and 41 percent of Asian-American women are married to non-Asians. Rodriguez not that children in remote villages around world are fans of superstars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Garth Brooks, yet "some Americans fear that immigrant living within the United States remain somehow immune to the nation% assimilative power. ' Are there divisive issues and pockets of seething in America? Indee D. It is big enough to have a bit of everything. But particularly when viewed against America's turbulent past, today's social induces suggest a dark and deteriorating social environment.

单选题He applied for Teaching Assistantship to finance his education and was ______ the position for his rich experience in teaching.

单选题When ______ the English standards of Japanese find Chinese secondary pupils, the professor gave no comment.