单选题{{B}}Passage Five{{/B}}
The bat is a marvel of evolutionary
adaptation. Most of them roost during the day, and are active at night or
twilight for they can avoid objects in the dark. I have seen this phenomenon at
work. In my youth, I used to explore old mining shafts in the Randsburg
district. Sometimes my intrusion disturbed clans of bats that were hanging
upside down in the dark caves. They would fly about to evident
panic, but the panic was mine, not theirs. Some flew crazily out into the
daylight but some merely returned to their perches. None ever touched me, much
to my relief. They may exist but I have never seen a stuffed
nylon bat. To children, bats may not be as lovable as koala bears. Perhaps
manufacturers do not regard them as marketable. It is not so much their hideous
faces and winged bodies that have caused us to get rid of bats, but rather the
ancient myths in which dead humans, such as Count Dracula, leave their graves at
night in the form of bats to suck blood from human victims, especially fragile
young woman. As we know from some movies these vampires must return to their
graves before daylight. Endangered young women can frustrate vampire by sleeping
with a string of garlic around their necks. There are actually
three species of bloodsucking bats. They are called vampire bats after the
ancient legends, and their tactics are indeed frightful. Like Count Dracula,
they feed at night. They make a small cut in their sleeping victim with sharp
incisor teeth, usually not even awakening their prey. Then they suck the blood
that sustains them. Should that discourage children from wanting
them as pets? As Mitchell notes from the New Yorker ad, bats are
clean and intelligent. Most of them are insect-eaters, and they serve nature by
destroying crop-damaging insects. They also pollinate (传授花粉) flowers and
spreading seed. Bat Conservation International claims that
without bats a host of insects/pests would multiply unchecked and many of our
planet's most valuable plants would go unpollinated. It is clear
that the bar is our friend, and that, despite its appearance, it is here to
serve humanity. I'd be the first to buy a stuffed nylon bat.
Children's hearts are big, and bats need love,
too.
单选题He was exhilarated by the thought of his ______ trip.
单选题In addition to redistributing incomes, inflation may affect the total real income and production of the community. An increase in prices is usually associated with high employment. In moderate inflation, industries are operating efficiently and output is near capacity. There is a great deal of private investment and jobs are plentiful. Such has been the historical pattern. Thus many business persons and union leaders, in evaluating a little deflation and a little inflation, consider the latter to be the lesser of two evils. In mild inflation, the losses to fixed-income groups are usually less than gains to the rest of the community. Even workers with relatively fixed wages are often better off because of improved employment opportunities and greater take-home pay, a rise in interest rates on new securities may partly compensate for any losses to creditor, and increases in pension benefits may partly make up losses to retirees. In deflation, on the other hand, the growing unemployment of labor and capital causes the community's total well-being to be less; so in a sense, the gainers get less than the losers lose. As a matter of fact, in a depression, or a time of severe deflation, almost everyone suffers, including the creditor who is left with uncollectible debts. For these reasons as increase in consumption of investment spending is considered good in times of unemployment, even if this tends to increase prices slightly. When the economic system is suffering from severe depression, few people will criticize private or public spending on the ground that this might be inflationary. Actually, most of this increased spending will increase production and create jobs. Once, full employment and full plant capacity have been reached, however, any further increases in spending are likely to be completely wasted in price increase.
单选题Scientists are expected to carry out thoroughgoing studies to {{U}}back up{{/U}} claim's made concerning new drugs.
单选题Woman. What do you think of the idea? Man: I couldn't come up with a better one. Question: What does the man mean?
单选题The special needs of old people for housing have ______ more attention from house designers.
单选题I found this very profitable in {{U}}diminishing {{/U}}the intensity of narrow-minded prejudice.
单选题A: ______ B: You'd better look before you leap.
单选题According to the passage, during the Carnival people in Rio did all of the following EXCEPT ______
单选题{{B}}Passage One{{/B}}
At the University of California at Los
Angeles (UCLA) , a student loaded his class notes into a handheld e-mail device
and tried to read them during an exam: a classmate turned him in. At the
University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) students photographed test questions
with their cell phone cameras and transmitted them to classmates. The university
put in place a new examination-supervision system. "If they'd spend as much time
studying, they'd all be A students," says Ron Yasbin, dean of the College of
Sciences of UNLV. With a variety of electronic devices, American
students find it easier to cheat. And college officials find themselves in
a new game of eat and mouse. They are trying to fight would-he cheats in the
exam season by cutting off Internet access from laptops(笔记本电脑), demanding the
surrender of cell phones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken
with pens and paper. "It is annoying. My hand-writing is
so bad," said Ryan Dapremont, 21 who just finished his third year at Pepperdine
University in California. He had to take his exams on paper. Dapremont said
technology has made cheating easier, but plagiarism(剽窃) in writing papers was
probably the biggest problem. Students can lift other people's writings off the
Internet without attributing them. Still, some students said
they thought cheating these days was more a product Of the mindset, not the
tools at hand. "Some people put too much emphasis on where they're going to go
in the future, and all they're thinking about is graduate school and the next
step," said Lindsay Nicholas, a third-year student at UCLA. She added that
pressure to succeed "sometimes clouds everything and makes people do things that
they shouldn't do. " Some professors said they tried to write
exams for which it was hard to cheat, posing questions that outside resources
would not help answer. Many officials said that they rely on campus honor
codes. They said the most important thing was to teach students not to cheat in
the first place.
单选题{{B}}Passage One{{/B}}
After flexing its mechanical arm and
finding some puzzling chemistry in a patch of Martian soil,the robotic rover
Spirit began investigating the composition of a rock named Adirondack yesterday
with two science instruments and a microscopic camera. Following
programmed instructions from flight controllers, the six-wheel rover made
several short turns and moved forward about six feet. It stopped within inches
of the pyramid-shaped rock, about the size of a football. It was the vehicle's
second maneuver on the Martian surface since landing there on Jan. 3.
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said they
did not expect results of the first rock examination until early today. But they
were already both pleased and puzzled over the soil test results.
"We're starting to put together a picture of what the soil at Gusev is
really like," Dr. Steven W. Squyres of Cornell, the principal scientist of the
mission, said at a news conference in Pasadena. He was referring to the Spirit's
landing site in Gusev crater, near the Martian equator. Two of the Spirit's main
science instruments, the M6ssbauer spectrometer and the alpha particle X-ray
spectrometer, made a close examination of soil near the landing base.
German scientists in charge of the studies reported that X-rays emitted by
the surface soil indicated a chemical composition mainly of silicon and iron,
with smaller amounts of sulfur, chlorine and argon. Argon is a noble gas that is
part of the Martian atmosphere. Previous Martian sites visited by landing craft
also contained significant amounts of sulfur and chlorine. Other
members of the project's science team said the M6ssbauer spectrometer found
considerable amounts of the mineral olivine in the soil. Olivine, which contains
oxygen, iron and magnesium, is often found in volcanic rocks. The Martian soil
may resemble the volcanic soil of Hawaii. "One possibility is
that this soil is simply ground-up lava," Dr. Squyres said. "That would surprise
me, but it's entirely possible that beneath .those grains there is solid rock
and we are detecting some of that solid rock, not the s0il."
Another property of the soil perplexed geologists. The fine grains of the
Gusev surface seem to stick together in dry clumps. Geologists suspected static
electricity as the clinging force. If so, they said, the soil should collapse
and flatten out when the M6ssbauer spectrometer pressed against the ground.
Nothing collapsed, leading Dr. Squyres to ask what force was. responsible for
holding them together.
单选题Man: Jane, do you know what the faculty members are doing among pizza boxes and soda cans?Woman: They are making time for the economic and management seminar.Question: What conclusion can we draw from this conversation?
单选题Gravity is a slippery beast. We don't know how strong it is, how it works or how fast its effects move. But this year we made progress. October saw the most accurate measurement yet of Newton's gravitational constant(引力常数 ), G, a measure of the strength of the gravitational interaction between two objects. A Swiss team calculated G's value by measuring how the gravitational pull of two huge tanks of mercury affected the weights of test masses. However, there are discrepancies between measurements of G made in different labs. This year a highly contentious(有争议的) explanation for this was proposed. A group of string theorists proposed that gravity is subtly affected by magnetic fields, and that G should be larger near Earth's poles where the magnetic field is stronger. Sure enough, this fits with the measurements so far. So G's varying values might just be the first proof of the hidden dimensions predicted by string theory. Equally tantalising is possible evidence for the existence of gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time supposedly caused by abrupt, violent cosmic events. An Italian team reported that two massive aluminium bars, one at CERN(欧洲粒子物理研究所) near Geneva, the other in Italy, had once vibrated in unison(一致)—perhaps as a result of a passing gravitational wave, they suggest. The claims will be closely scrutinised by gravity researchers in Washington state. They got to turn on a very expensive toy this year. LIGO, one of the biggest scientific instruments ever built. Its twin sets of intersecting 4-kilometre-long laser beams should be very sensitive to any waves. But so far the $400-million machine has not seen anything. At least one gravitational mystery has (hopefully) been wrapped up this year. when you move something, how long before its new position will affect its gravitational pull on surrounding objects? In other words, what is the speed of gravity? Newton thought the effect instantaneous, but Einstein said it could travel no faster than the speed of light. Astronomers have finally devised a way to test which one of them was right, based on the way gravity bends radio waves from a distant quasar(类星体). They finished the experiment in September. We don't yet know the answer but our money is on Einstein.
单选题A: What are you and Joe doing this weekend, Michelle? Would you be free to come over for drinks after dinner sometime? B: ______
单选题Woman: Some people know a lot more than they tell.Man: Unfortunately the reverse is also true.Question: What does the man imply?
单选题One evening, when there was no staff to
supervise
him, he walked out of the hospital.
单选题I will try to {{U}}confirm{{/U}} whether your reservations have been processed.
单选题{{B}}Passage Five{{/B}}
Architects are hopeless when it comes
to deciding whether the public will view their designs as marvels or
monstrosities, according to a study by Canadian psychologists. They say
designers should go back to school to learn about ordinary people's
tastes. Many buildings that appeal to architects get the thumbs
down from the public. Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British
Columbia decided to find out whether architects understand public preferences
and simply disagree with them, or fail to understand the lay person's
view. With his colleague Graham Brown, he asked 25 experienced
architects to look at photos of 42 large buildings in the US, Canada, Europe and
Hong Kong. The architects predicted how the public would rate the buildings on a
scale of 1 to 10, where 1 represented "terrible” and 10"excellent". A further 27
people who were not architects also scored the buildings out of 10. In addition,
eight architects gave their own personal ratings of the buildings.
The three groups tended to agree among themselves on a building's merits.
And architects correctly predicted that lay people would on average rate
buildings higher than they did themselves. But for individual buildings, the
architects' perceptions of what the lay people would think were often way off
the mark. "Some architects are quite good at predicting lay preferences, but
others are not only poor at it, they get it backwards,” says Gilford.
For instance, architects gave the Stockley Park Building B-3 offices in
London a moderate rating of 5.2. They thought the public would like it much
better, predicting a rating of 6.3. But the public actually disliked the
offices, and gave it 4.7. Gifford thinks that lay people respond to specific
features of buildings, such as durability and originality, and hopes to pin down
what they are. "Architects in architecture school need to be
taught how lay people think about buildings," Gifford concludes. He doesn't
think designers should pander to the lowest common denominator, but suggests
they should aspire towards buildings that appeal to the public and architects
alike, such as the Bank of China building in Hong Kong. Marco
Goldschmeid of the Richard Rogers Partnership, designers of the Millennium Dome
in London, thinks the study is flawed. "The authors have assumed, wrongly, that
buildings can be meaningfully judged from photographs rather than actual
visits," he says. Goldschmeid thinks it would be more significant and
interesting to look at the divergence of public taste between
generations.
单选题John is ______ to pollen.
单选题Flu shots are given every fall as a {{U}}precaution{{/U}} against an epidemic the following winter.
