单选题{{B}}Passage 5{{/B}}
The average population density of the
world is 47 persons per square mile. Continental densities range from no
permanent inhabitants in Antarctica to 211 per square mile in Europe. In the
western hemisphere, population densities range from about 4 per square mile in
Canada to 675 per square mile in Puerto Rico. In Europe the range is from 4 per
square mile in Iceland to 831 per square mile in the Netherlands. within
countries there are wide variations of population densities. For example, in
Egypt, the average is 55 persons per square mile, but 1,300 persons inhabit each
square mile in settled portions where the land is arable. High
population densities generally occur in regions of developed industrialization,
such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Great Britain, or where lands are
intensively used for agriculture, as in Puerto Rico and Java.
Low average population densities are characteristic of most underdeveloped
countries. Low density of population is generally associated with a relatively
low percentage of cultivated land. This generally results from poor-quality
lands. It may also be due to natural obstacles to cultivation, such as deserts,
mountains or malaria-infested jungles, to land uses other than cultivation, as
pasture and forested land, to primitive methods that limit cultivation, to
social obstacles, and to land ownership systems which keep land out of
production. More economically advanced countries of low
population density have, as a rule, large proportions of their populations
living in urban areas. Their rural population densities are usually very low.
Poorer developed countries of correspondingly low general population density, on
the other hand, often have a concentration of rural population living on arable
land, which is as great as the rural concentration found in the most densely
populated industrial countries.
单选题It is always______in some ways, because if it were performed as a primitive fending-off or covering-up action, it would obviously be too transparent
单选题Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behaviour is regarded as "all too human", with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely. But a study by Sarach Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well. The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys. They look cute. They are good-natured, cooperative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of "goods and services" than males. Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr. Brosnan's and Dr. de Waal's study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to exchange pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different. In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods(are much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber(without an actual monkey to eat it)was enough to induce resentment in a female capuchin. The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a cooperative, group-living species. Such cooperation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems for the common ancestor that the species had 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.
单选题According to the research findings mentioned in the passage, reptiles ______.
单选题She______his invitation to dinner as she was on a diet. A. inclined B. declined C. denied D. disinclined
单选题Reading became difficult for the old man, so the optician ______ glasses.
单选题
单选题Their signing of the treaty was regarded as a conspiracy against the British Crown.
单选题The Chinese world diving champion was ______ from the national team, which has been front-page reported in the country for several days.
单选题If you smoke and you still don"t believe that there"s a definite between smoking and bronchial troubles, heart disease and lung cancer, then you are certainly deceiving yourself. No one will accuse you of hypocrisy. Let us just say that you are suffering from a bad case of wishful thinking. This needn"t make you too uncomfortable because you are in good company. Whenever the subject of smoking and health is raised, the governments of most countries hear no evil, see no evil and smell no evil. Admittedly, a few governments have taken timid measures. In Britain, for example, cigarette advertising has been banned on television. The conscience of the nation is appeased, while the population continues to puff its way to smoky, cancerous death.
You don"t have to look very far to find out why the official reactions to medical findings have been so lukewarm. The answer is simply money. Tobacco is a wonderful commodity to tax. It"s almost like a tax on our daily bread. In tax revenue alone, the government of Britain collects enough from smokers to pay for its entire educational facilities. So while the authorities point out ever so discreetly that smoking may, conceivably, be harmful, it doesn"t do to shout too loudly about it.
This is surely the most short-sighted policy you could imagine. While money is eagerly collected in vast sums with one hand, it is paid out in increasingly vaster sums with the other. Enormous amounts are spent on cancer research and on efforts to cure people suffering from the disease. Countless valuable lives are lost. In the long run, there is no doubt that everybody would be much better-off if smoking were banned altogether.
of course, we are not ready for such drastic action. But if the governments of the world were honestly concerned about the welfare of their peoples, you"d think they"d conduct aggressive antismoking campaigns. Far from it! Tile tobacco industry is allowed to spend staggering sums on advertising. Its advertising is as insidious as it is dishonest. We are never shown pictures of real smokers coughing up their lungs early in the morning. That would never do. The advertisements always depict virile, clean-shaven young men. They suggest it is manly to smoke, even positively healthy! Smoking is associated with the great open-air life, with beautiful girls, true love and togetherness. What utter nonsense!
For a start, governments, could begin by banning all cigarette and tobacco advertising and should then conduct anti-smoking advertising campaigns of their own. Smoking should be banned in all public places like theatres, cinemas and restaurants. Great efforts should be made to inform young people especially of the dire consequences of taking up the habit. A horrific warning--say, a picture of a death"s head--should be included in every packet of cigarettes that is sold. As individuals we are certainly weak, but if governments acted honestly and courageously, they could protect us from ourselves.
单选题______ animals must be kept in cages in case they might hurt the tourists. A. Land B. Domestic C. Vicious D. Farm
单选题For the longest time, I couldn't get worked up about privacy: my right to it; how it's dying; how we're headed for an even more wired, underregulated, overintrusive, privacy-deprived planet. I should also point out that as news director for Pathfinder, Time Inc.'s mega info mall, and a guy who on the Web, I know better than most people that we're hurtling toward an even more intrusive world. We're all being watched by computers whenever we visit Websites; by the mere act of "browsing" (it sounds so passive!) we're going public in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago.I know this because I'm a watcher too. When people come to my Website, without ever knowing their names, I can peer over their shoulders, recording what they look at, timing how long they stay on a particular page, following them around Pathfinder's sprawling offerings. None of this would bother me in the least, I suspect, if a few years ago, my phone,.like Marley's ghost, hadn't given me a glimpse of the nightmares to come. On Thanksgiving weekend in 1995, someone (presumably a critic of a book my wife and I had just written about computer hackers) forwarded my home telephone number to an out-of-state answering machine, where unsuspecting callers trying to reach me heard a male voice identify himself as me and say some extremely rude things.Then, with typical hacker aplomb, the prankster asked people to leave their messages (which to my surprise many callers, including my mother, did). This went on for several days until my wife and I figured out that something was wrong ("Hey...why hasn't the phone rung since Wednesday?") and got our phone service restored. It seemed funny at first, and it gave us a swell story to tell on our book tour. But the interloper who seized our telephone line continued to hit us even after the tour ended. And hit us again and again for the next six months. The phone company seemed powerless. Its security folks moved us to one unlisted number after another, half a dozen times. They put special pin codes in place. They put traces on the line. But the troublemaker kept breaking through. If our hacker had been truly evil and omnipotent as only fictional movie hackers are, there would probably have been even worse ways he could have threatened my privacy. He could have sabotaged my credit rating. He could have eavesdropped on my telephone conversations or siphoned off my e-mail. He could have called in my mortgage, discontinued my health insurance or obliterated my Social Security number. Like Sandra Bullock in The Net, I could have been a digital untouchable, wandering the planet without a connection to the rest of humanity. (Although if I didn't have to pay back school loans, it might be worth it. Just a thought.) Still, I remember feeling violated at the time and as powerless as a minnow in a flash flood. Someone was invading my private space--my family's private space--and there was nothing I or the authorities could do. It was as close to a technological epiphany as I have ever been. And as I watched my personal digital hell unfold, it struck me that our privacy- mine and yours- has already disappeared, not in one Big Brotherly blitzkrieg but in Little Brotherly moments, bit by bit. Losing control of your telephone, of course, is the least of it. After all, most of us voluntarily give out our phone number and address when we allow ourselves to be listed in the White Pages. Most of us go a lot further than that. We register our whereabouts whenever we put a bank card in an ATM machine or drive through an E-Z Pass lane on the highway. We submit to being photographed every day--20 times a day on average if you live or work in New York City--by surveillance cameras. We make public our interests and our purchasing habits every time we shop by mail order or visit a commercial Website.
单选题Compact with a traditional polygraph a thermal camera ______.
单选题He had a serious car (accident) last week and (broke) his left leg because he got (drunk) and drove too (fastly).
单选题It is______that the Internet is exerting a growing important influence on people's lives.
单选题The report was unusual in that it is Uinsinuated/U corruption on the part of the minister.
单选题Betty, though ______ in most things, spent a lot of money on clothes. A. economical B. economic C. excessive D. extravagant
单选题________ in India, the banana was brought to the Americas by the Portuguese who found it in Africa.
单选题It Ustands to reason/U that if he never prepares his lessons, be is not going to make good progress.
单选题Why do so many Americans distrust what they read in their newspapers? The American Society of Newspaper Editors is Wing to answer this painful question. The organization is deep into a long self-analysis known as the journalism credibility project.
Sad to say, this project has turned out to be mostly low-level findings about factual errors and spelling and grammar mistakes, combined with lots of head-scratching puzzlement about what in the world those readers really want.
But the sources of distrust go Way deeper. Most journalists learn to see the world through a set of standard templates (patterns) into which they plug each day"s events. In other words, there is a conventional story line in the newsroom culture that provides a backbone and a ready-made narrative structure for otherwise confusing news.
There exists a social and cultural disconnect between journalists and their readers, which helps explain why the "standard templates" of the newsroom seem alien to many readers. In a recent survey, questionnaires were sent to reporters in five middle-size cities around the country, plus one large metropolitan area. Then residents in these communities were phoned at random and asked the same questions.
Replies show that compared with other Americans, journalists are more likely to live in upscale neighborhoods, have maids, own Mercedeses, and trade stocks, and they"re less likely to go to church, do volunteer work, or put down roots in a community.
Reporters tend to be part of a broadly defined social and cultural elite, so their work tends to reflect the conventional values of this elite. The astonishing distrust of the news media isn"t rooted in inaccuracy or poor reportorial skills but in the daily clash of world views between reporters and their readers.
This is an explosive situation for any industry, particularly a declining one. Here is a troubled business that keeps hiring employees whose attitudes vastly annoy the customers. Then it sponsors lots of symposiums and a credibility project dedicated to wondering why customers are annoyed and fleeing in large numbers. But it never seems to get around to noticing the cultural and class biases that so many former buyers are complaining about. If it did, it would open up its diversity program, now focused narrowly on race and gender, and look for reporters who differ broadly by outlook, values, education, and class.