单选题A: Front desk. Can I help you? B: ______

单选题While living in Brazil, I used to {{U}}crave{{/U}} the dishes prepared by my mother.

单选题The states had no recourse but to look forward to the verdict of the high tribunal.

单选题Whether a gun is a weapon of offence or a weapon of ______ depends on which end of it you are at.

单选题The fridge is considered a necessity. It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food first appeared with the label: "store in the refrigerator. " In my fridgeless fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthily. The milkman came daily, the grocer, the butcher, the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times a week. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and surplus bread and milk became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and we were never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on food deliveries have ceased, fresh vegetables are almost unobtainable in the country. The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. A vast way of well-tried techniques already existed—natural cooling, drying, smoking salting, sugaring, bottling... What refrigeration did promote was marketing—marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the globe in search of a good price. Consequently, most of the world's fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the wealthy countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-cooled space inside an artificially-heated house while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge. The fridge's effect upon the environment has been evident, while its contribution to human happiness has been insignificant. If you don't believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cabinet and turn off your fridge next winter. You may miss the hamburgers, but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum.

单选题Man: Sam has bought a laptop. I felt I should buy one too. Woman.. How can you hold a candle to him? What does his father do, do you know? Question: What does the woman mean?

单选题(Despite) the growth of (manufacturing) and other industries, the economy of the state of Texas (has) remained heavily (dependence) on oil and gas.

单选题A: This pain in my head is terrible. B: ______

单选题Meanwhile, I always kept in touch with my former professor at college, by letter and telephone.

单选题{{B}}Passage Five{{/B}} If there is one thing scientists have to hear, it is that the game is over. Raised on the belief of an endless voyage of discovery, they recoil (畏缩) from the suggestion that most of the best things have already been located. If they have, today's scientists can hope to contribute no more than a few grace notes to the symphony of science. A book to be published in Britain this week, The End of Science, argues persuasively that this is the case. Its author, John Horgan, is a senior writer for Scientific American magazine, who has interviewed many of today's leading scientists and science philosophers. The shock of realizing that science might be over came to him, he says, when he was talking to Oxford mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose. The End of Science provoked a wave of denunciation (谴责) in the United States last year. "The reaction has been one of complete shock and disbelief," Mr. Horgan says. The real question is whether any remaining unsolved problems, of which there are plenty, lend themselves to universal solutions. If they do not, then the focus of scientific discovery is already narrowing. Since the triumphs of the 1960s—the genetic code, plate tectonics (快板构造税) , and the microwave background radiation that went a long way towards proving the Big Bang—genuine scientific revolutions have been scarce. More scientists are now alive, spending more money on research, that ever. Yet most of the great discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries were made before the appearance of state sponsorship, when the scientific enterprise was a fraction of its present size. Were the scientists who made these discoveries brighter than today's? That seems unlikely. A far more reasonable explanation is that fundamental science has already entered a period of diminished returns. "Look, don't get me wrong," says Mr. Horgan. "There are lots of important things still to study, and applied science and engineering can go on for ever. I hope we get a cure for cancer, and for mental disease, though there are few real signs of progress."

单选题The collapse of the Earth's magnetic field—which guards the planet and guides many of its creatures—appears to have started seriously about 150 years ago, the New York Times reported last week. The field's strength has decreased by 10 or 15 per cent so far and this has increased the debate over whether it signals a reversal of the planet's lines of magnetic force. During a reversal, the main field weakens, almost vanishes, and reappears with opposite polarity. The transition would take thousands of years. Once completed, compass needles that had pointed north would point south. A reversal could cause problems for both man and animals. Astronauts and satellites would have difficulties. Birds, fish and animals that rely on the magnetic field for navigation would find migration confusing. But experts said the effects would not be a big disaster, despite claims of doom and vague evidence of links between past field reversals and species extinctions. Although a total transition may be hundreds or thousands of years away, the rapid decline in magnetic strength is already affecting satellites. Last month, the European Space Agency approved the world's largest effort at tracking the field's shifts. A group of new satellites, called Swarm, is to monitor the collapsing field with far greater precision. "We want to get some idea of how this would evolve in the near future, just like people trying to predict the weather," said Gauthier Hulot, a French geophysicist working on the satellite plan. "I'm personally quite convinced we should be able to work out the first predictions by the end of the mission." No matter what the new findings, the public has no reason to panic. Even if a transition is coming on its way, it might take 2 000 years to mature. The last one took place 780 000 years ago, when early humans were learning how to make stone tools. Deep inside the Earth flow hot currents of melted iron. This mechanical energy creates electromagnetism. This process is known as the geophysical generator. In a car's generator, the same principle turns mechanical energy into electricity. No one knows precisely why the field periodically reverses. But scientists say the responsibility probably lies with changes in the disorderly flows of melted iron, which they see as similar to the gases that make up the clouds of Jupiter.

单选题Attending a church, temple, or mosque is one way to make agreeable friends.

单选题A brisk walk in cool weather is invigorating.

单选题{{B}}Passage Five{{/B}} When Frank Dale took over as publisher of Los Angeles Herrald-Examiner, the organization had just ended a ten-year strike. There was much bitterness and, as he told us. "Everybody that I found there had lost their curiosity, they'd lost their cutting edge, there was no interest, they just hung on...I had a real problem." His very first task was to introduce himself to everybody, to thank them for their loyalty to that point, and to allow them to express their concerns and frustrations. To questions like "What makes you think you can make this thing go?" he responded, "I don't know yet, but in thirty days I’ll come back to you and let you know what I've found." He recruited a task force of the best people from throughout the Hearst Corporation to do a crash study, and in thirty days he had a written report on what needed to be done, which he shared with the staff. He had taken the all-important first steps to establish mutual trust, without which leadership would not have been possible. Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together. The accumulation of trust is a measure of the legitimacy of leadership. It cannot be demanded or purchased; it must be earned. Trust is the basic ingredient of all organizations, the lubrication that maintains the organization, and it is as mysterious and difficult a concept as leadership-and as important. One thing we can say for sure about trust is that if trust is to be generated, there must be predictability, the capacity to predict another's behavior. Another way of putting it is to say that organizations without trust would resemble the ambiguous nightmare of Kafka's The Castle, where nothing can be certain and nobody can be relied on or be held responsible. The ability to predict outcomes with s high probability of success generates and maintaining trust.

单选题Hundreds of years ago cloves (丁香) were used to remedy headaches.

单选题{{B}}Passage Five{{/B}} He is a rare celebrity scientist. He's even had a TV cameo role (小角色) in Star Trek in which he plays poker with scientific icons (偶像)Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Yet when asked about comparisons between himself and the two scientists, he calls it all "media hype (炒作)." Once asked how he felt about being labeled the world's smartest person, he responded: "It is very embarrassing. It is rubbish, just media hype. They just want a hero, and I fill the role model of a disabled genius. At least I am disabled, but I am no genius. " Hawking has ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, a neuromuscular disease that progressively weakens muscle control. He gets around in a wheelchair, and after completely losing the use of his vocal chords in an operation to assist his breathing in 1985, he communicates through a computer. A speech synthesizer "speaks" for him after he punches in what he wants to say, selecting words in the computer software by pressing a switch with his hand. Unfortunately, it makes him sound like he has an American accent, he says. Despite his humorous, self-effacing manner, Hawking is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists. Many consider him to be the most brilliant since Einstein. Since 1979, he's held the post of Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University—which was once held by Isaac Newton no less—and has twelve honorary degrees. He's also a best-selling author. His book, A Brief History of Time ,has been translated into 33 languages and has sold nine million copies. For much of his academic life, Hawking has been among a group of theoretical physicists searching for a "theory of everything'—one unified scientific theory that explains the big cosmological questions like How did the universe begin? Why is the universe the way it is? and How will it end ? You are probably familiar with the existing theories, such as the Big Bang theory. However, these theories are inconsistent with each other. So Hawking—among a group of theoretical physicists—has been on a quest to come. up with a theory of quantum (量子)gravity that would incorporate these theories—the theory of everything (TOE)—which would solve the problem of what caused the universe to start expanding. How successful have the world's leading cosmologists been? Hawking predicts we'll have the TOE in the next 20 years.

单选题At a press conference after the award ceremony, the 18-year-old girl spoke in a barely ______ voice.