单选题{{B}}Passage Five{{/B}} Language learning begins with listening. Individual children vary greatly in the amount of listening they do before they start speaking, and late starters are often long listeners. Most children will "obey" spoken instructions some time before they Can speak, though the word "obey" is hardly accurate as a description of the eager and delighted cooperation usually shown by the child. Before they can speak, many children will also ask questions by gestures and by making questioning noises. Any attempt to trace the development from the noises babies make to their first spoken words leads to considerable difficulties. It is agreed that they enjoy making noises, and that during the first few months one or two noises sort themselves out as particularly indicative of delight, distress, sociability, and so on. But since these cannot be said to show the baby's intention to communicate, they can hardly be regarded as early forms of language. It is agreed, too, that from about three months they play with sounds for enjoyment, and that by six months they are able to add new sounds to their store. This self-imitation leads on to deliberate imitation of sounds made or words spoken to them by other people. The problem then arisen so to the point at which one can say that these imitations can be considered as speech. It is a problem we need not get our teeth into. The meaning of a word depends on what a particular person means by it in a particular ,situation and it is clear that what a child means by a word will change as he gains more experience of the world. Thus the use,at say seven months, of "mama" as a greeting for his mother cannot be dismissed as a meaningless sound simply because he also uses it at other times for his father, his dog, or anything else he likes. Playful and apparently meaningless imitation of what other people say continues after the child has begun to speak for himself. I doubt, however; whether anything is gained when parents cash in on this ability in an attempt to teach new sounds. (370w)

单选题______ fabrics usually don"t wrinkle as much as cotton.

单选题{{B}}Passage Four{{/B}} Within a large concrete room, cut out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity. The room is a vault (地下库) designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the collapse of electricity supplies. "If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organization promoting the project. The Norwegian (挪威的) government is planning to create the seed bank next year at the request of crop scientists. The $3 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security doors. The vault's seed collection will represent the products of some 10, 000 years of plant breeding by the world's farmers. Though most are no longer widely planted, the varieties contain vital genetic properties still regularly used in plant breeding. To survive, the seeds need freezing temperatures. Operators plan to replace the air inside the vault each winter, when temperatures in Spitsbergen are around -18℃. But even if some disaster meant that the vault was abandoned, the permanently frozen soil would keep the seeds alive. And even accelerated global warming would take many decades to penetrate the mountain vault. "This will be the world's most secure gene bank," says Fowler. "But. its seeds will only be used when all other samples have gone for some reason." The project comes at a time when there is growing concern about the safety of existing seed banks around the world. Many have been criticized for their poor security, ageing refrigeration (冷藏) systems and vulnerable electricity supplies. The scheme won UN approval at a meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome in October 2005. A feasibility study said the facility "would essentially be built to last forever".

单选题Awarding scholarships to students for their athletic ability is {{U}}condemned{{/U}} by many people.

单选题Largely due to the university tradition, every college student here works ______ .

单选题Governments that want their people to prosper in the burgeoning world economy should guarantee two basic rights: the right to private property and the right to enforceable contracts, says Mancur Olson in his book Power and Prosperity. Olson was an economics professor at the University of Maryland until his death in 1998. Some have argued that such rights are merely luxuries that wealthy societies bestow, but Olson turns that argument around and asserts that such rights are essential to creating wealth. "Incomes are low in most of the countries of the world, in short, because the people in those countries do not have secure individual rights," he says. Certain simple economic activities, such as food gathering and making handicrafts, rely mostly on individual labor; property is not necessary. But more advanced activities, such as the mass production of goods, require machines and factories and offices. This pro duction is often called capital-intensive, but it is really property-intensive, Olson observes. "No one would normally engage in capital-intensive production if he or she did not have rights that kept the valuable capital from being taken by bandits, whether roving or stationary," he argues. "There is no private property without government individuals may have possessions, the way a dog possesses a bone, but there is private property only if the society protects and defends a private right to that possession against other private parties and against the government as well. " Would-be entrepreneurs, no matter how small, also need a government and court system that will make sure people honor their contracts. In fact, the banking systems relied on by developed nations are based on just such an enforceable contract system. "We would not deposit our money in banks if we could not rely on the bank having to honor its contract with us, and the bank would not be able to make the profits it needs to stay in business if it could not enforce its loan contracts with borrowers," Olson writes. Other economists have argued that the poor economies of Third World and communist countries are the result of governments setting both prices and the quantities of goods produced rather than letting a free market determine them. Olson agrees there is some merit to this point of view, but he argues that government intervention is not enough to explain the poverty of these countries. Rather, the real problem is lack of individual rights that give people incentive to generate wealth. "If a society has clear and secure individual rights, there are strong incentives (刺激,动力) to produce, invest, and engage in mutually advantageous trade, and therefore at least some economic advance," Olson concludes.

单选题Man: The competition is increasingly fierce. What shall we do next? Woman: If other companies lower their prices, we'll have to follow suit. Question：What does the woman suggest?

单选题Many students find the experience of attending university lectures to be a confusing and frustrating experience. The lecturer speaks for one or two hours, perhaps (61) the talk with slides, writing up important information on the blackboard, (62) reading material and giving out (63) The new student sees the other students continuously writing on notebooks and (64) what to write. Very often the student leaves the lecture (65) notes which do not catch the main points and (66) become hard even for the students to understand. Most institutions provide courses which (67) new students to develop the skills they need to be (68) listeners and note-takers. (69) these are unavailable, there are many useful study-skills guides which (70) learners to practice these skills independently. In all cases it is important to (71) the problem before actually starting your studies. It is important to (72) that most students have difficulty in acquiring the language skills (73) in college study. One way of (74) these difficulties is to attend the language and study-skills classes which most institutions provide throughout the (75) year. Another basic strategy is to find a study partner with whom it is possible to identify difficulties, exchange ideas and provide support.

单选题I have been for years troubling the pages of historians, to find out what our fathers have done to the native Americans, but I must say, that my researches have ______ been to no effect.

单选题Compared with their cosmologist(宇宙学家) colleagues, cosmogonists(星源学家) can sound a little old-fashioned. Edgar Allen Poe turned to the mysteries of cosmogony in an 1848 public lecture, just reprinted by Hesperus Press. And we encountered a reference to cosmogonists most recently in a new edition of Poe's prose poem Eureka. What's the difference between cosmologists and cosmogonists? Just two letters and a few billion light years. Cosmologists worry about where the Universe came from, cosmogonists with how the Solar System formed. The interesting thing is that one-and-a-half centuries after Poe, they still can't reach agreement on what happened in the nearest 5 light years of space. What's the problem? It turns out that there are a couple of competing explanations for why our neighbourhood is the shape it is, as well as several bizarre anomalies in the data. Cosmogonists know that the Solar System is essentially flat. With the exception of two tiny outliers, Mercury and Pluto, the orbits of all the other planets lie in very nearly the same plane. And most cosmogonists agree that this is because the planets themselves formed from a nebular(星云状的)disc orbiting the early Sun, which had itself coalesced out of the same cloud of gas and dust. But there's a catch. If the planets and the Sun came from the same nebular disc, then the Sun's equator should lie in the planetary plane. It doesn't. The Sun leans over at an angle of 7.25° The majority of cosmogonists insist that the angle is so close to zero that it really doesn't matter. Anyway, they add, the Sun has been losing mass for most of its life, and may have slipped a little. The remaining minority aren't having this. How can 7.25° be the same as zero? The Sun and the planets did come from cosmic dust, they say, but not from the same cloud of material. The Sun took shape somewhere in the Galaxy. Then it sailed along and picked up the planets—or perhaps the gas and dust that gave birth to them—elsewhere. Is a tilting Sun the cosmogonists' only headache? Not at all. It's also hard to agree on how the outer planets formed. Far out in the nebular disc, matter would have been so spread out that it couldn't quickly have dumped together. Some suggest planet-sized gravitational instabilities, others can find no reason for Uranus and Neptune to have formed yet. The closer you get to home, it seems, the deeper the mysteries.

单选题I couldn’t afford to fly home , and a train ticket was {{U}}likewise {{/U}} beyond my means.

单选题The 16 percent fare increase would bring Chicago fares Uin line with/U those of other big cities.

单选题The total amount of energy received per minute by the whole earth is a great sum, but it is only a tiny fraction of the total energy {{U}}radiated{{/U}} by sun.

单选题Mark Twain is one of the best American {{U}}creative{{/U}} writers.

单选题The first-year students at college normally ______ in age from 17 to 20 years old.

单选题According to Buffett's daughter, her father ______

单选题Smuggling is a detrimental activity which might bring destruction to our economy; therefore, it must be banned.

单选题Some people (choose) to go on cruises as a way of rewarding themselves. Certainly if you have plenty of money this (can be) a good idea, though it may not (turn off) quite (as) expected.

单选题Man: This suitcase cost me 200 dollars. Woman: 200 dollars for a piece of junk like that? That's a rip-oft. Question: What does the woman mean?

单选题A: I'd like to place a person-to-person call to Chicago. The number is 932-8647, but I don't know the area code. B: ______