单选题She accidentally swallowed the poison and death was ______. A. instantaneous B. simultaneous C. symmetrical D. insufficient

单选题Today"s college students are more narcissistic (自恋的) and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society. "We need to stop endlessly repeating "You"re special" and having children repeat that back," said the study"s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already. Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," he said. The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors". Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today"s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled- and More Miserable Than Ever Before", said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others. Some analysts have commended today"s young people for increased commitment to volunteer work. But Twenge viewed even this phenomenon skeptically, noting that many high schools require community service and many youths feel pressure to list such endeavors on college applications. Campbell said the narcissism upsurge seemed so pronounced(非常明显的)that he was unsure if there were obvious remedies. "Permissiveness seems to be a component," he said. "A potential antidote would be more authoritative parenting. Less indulgence might be called for." Yet students, while acknowledging some legitimacy to such findings, don"t necessarily accept negative generalizations about their generation. Hanady Kader, a University of Washington senior, said she worked unpaid last summer helping resettle refugees and considers many of her peers to be civic-minded. But she is dismayed (气馁；灰心) by the competitiveness of some students who seem prematurely focused on career status. "We"re encouraged a lot to be individuals and go out there and do what you want, and nobody should stand in your way," Kader said. "I can see goals and ambitions getting in the way of other things like relationships." Kari Dalane, a University of Vermont sophomore, says most of her contemporaries are politically active and not overly self-centered. "People are worried about themselves--but in the sense of where are they"re going to find a place in the world," she said. "People want to look their best, have a good time, but it doesn"t mean they"re not concerned about the rest of the world." Besides, some of the responses on the narcissism test might not be worrisome, Dalane said. "It would be more depressing if people answered, "No, you are not special.""

单选题At the beginning of the story, the fox seems to be all EXCEPT______.

单选题Anything to do with old myths and legends ______ me.(2004年湖北省考博试题)

单选题Adages are frequently mutually antagonistic witness, "ignorance breeds prejudice" and "familiarity, breeds contempt."

单选题Despite all the healed ______ they had, they remained the best of friends throughout their lives.

单选题 When you meet Tim Winton, it's easy to understand his success at writing for teenagers. He likes surfing and fishing and camping and hanging out in the vast tract of sand dunes that borders the one-pub fishing town where he lives in Western Australia. He even looks like the big kid who sat behind you in high school and has the kind of laid-back manner and earthy conversation that you know appeals to those too young to be treated as kids but not grown-up enough to be admitted to the adult world. Winton's first foray into teenage fiction, Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo, is about to go into its second printing. Even more gratifying for the writer has been the response the book has prompted. He's had scores of appreciative letters "from kids, parents, teachers", and has read passages from the book to students in country high schools. Writing for young readers has also enabled Winton to find a wider, non-literary audience. "It's very difficult to break out of the few-thousand-group of Australians who read, of whom half or all are professional or semi-professional readers. It's nice to get to people who aren't jaded, who will come at a story and read it for what it is. "You don't have to deal with their education and their past and their biases." Winton was himself still a teenager when he started writing seriously at 16. Three years later, in 1981, he was named joint winner of The Australian Vogel Literary Award for his first novel, An Open Swimmer. Had he known when he was 16 how difficult it is to make a living as a writer, he would never have started. "I was about 10 when I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I guess I lacked the imagination to think of anything else," he said. "I got the idea and I just stuck with it. I was unaware of how hard it is to make a living from the people you have to deal with." Neither lack of imagination nor inattention to detail is evident in Winton's writing. In That Eye, The Sky, he takes us into the turbulent soul of his 12-year-old protagonist, Morton Flack, with prose that sends you back to long, hot summer holidays in the country. The hot white day swims along real snow like the sun is breast-stroking through that blue sky when it should be going freestyle. Everyone hangs around the shade of the house listening to the trees in the east wind. The ground is wobbly with heat. The house ticks. You can hear seeds popping, grass drying up and fainting flat. You can hear the snakes puffing. Other young protagonists have been given voice in Winton's short stories, so the transition to writing for teenagers, instead of about them, was a smooth one. "Lockie's not so different in tone from the adult books," he said. "If you get too self-conscious when you're writing for kids, you end up talking down to them--you just use your own tone and be yourself, and if that doesn't work, it probably wouldn't have anyway."

单选题Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, by babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes one more agent of evolution has gone. There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes. For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical changes. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years even the past 100 years, our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution—they "look at an organic being as average looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension". No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

单选题Before we move, we should ______ some of the old furniture, so that we can have more room in the new house. A. cancel B. conceal C. discard D. retain

单选题Her sadness was obvious, but she believed that her feeling of depression was ______. A. torrent B. transient C. tensile D. textured

单选题 Ocean water plays an indispensable role in supporting life. The great ocean basins hold about 300 million cubic miles of water. From this vast amount; about 80,000 cubic miles of water are sucking into the atmosphere each year by evaporation and returned by precipitation and drainage to the ocean. More than 24,000 cubic miles of rain descend annually upon the continents. This vast amount is required to replenish the lakes and streams, springs and water tables on which all flora and fauna are dependent. Thus, the hydrosphere permits organism existence. The hydrosphere has strange characteristics because water has properties unlike those of any other liquid. One anomaly is that water upon freezing expands by about 9 percent, whereas most liquids contract on cooling. For this reason, ice floats on water bodies instead of sinking to the bottom. If the ice sank, the hydrosphere would soon be frozen solidly, except for a thin layer of surface melt water during the summer season. Thus, all aquatic life would be destroyed and the interchange of warm and cold currents, which moderates climate, would be notably absent. Another outstanding characteristic of water is that it has a heat capacity which is the highest of all liquids and solids except ammonia. This characteristic enables the oceans to absorb ard store vast quantities of heat, thereby often preventing climatic extremes. In addition, water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. It is this characteristic which helps make oceans a great storehouse for minerals which have been washed down from the continents. In several areas of the world these minerals are being commercially exploited. Solar evaporation of salt is widely practiced, potash is extracted from the Dead Sea, and Magnesium is produced from seawater along the American Gulf Coast.

单选题Usually he managed to find plenty of work to ______ him over hard times, I think it is a good idea.

单选题I could see that my wife was ______ having that fur coat, whether I approved of it or not. [A] adequate for [B] intent on [C] short of [D] deficient in

单选题It happened in the late fall of 1939 when, after a Nazi submarine had penetrated the British sea defense around the Firth of Forth and damaged a British cruiser, Reston and a colleague contrived to get the news past British censorship. They cabled a series of seemingly harmless sentences to The Times's editors in New York, having first sent a message instructing the editors to regard only the last word of each sentence. Thus they were able to convey enough words to spell out the story. The fact that the news of the submarine attack was printed in New York before it had appeared in the British press sparked a big controversy that led to an investigation by Scotland Yard and British Military Intelligence. But it took the investigators eight weeks to decipher The Times's reporters' code, an embarrassingly slow bit of detective work, and when it was finally solved the incident had given the story very prominent play, later expressed dismay that the reporters had risked so much for so little. And the incident left Reston deeply distressed. It was so out of character for him to have. become involved in such a thing. The tactics were questionable and, though the United States was not yet in the war, Britain was already established as America's close ally and breaking British censorship seemed both an irresponsible and unpatriotic thing to do.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} Despite Denmark's manifest virtues, Danes never talk about how proud they are to be Danes. This would sound weird in Danish. When Danes talk to foreigners about Denmark, they always begin by commenting on its tininess, its unimportance, the difficulty of its language, the general small-mindedness and self=indulgence of their countrymen and the high taxes. No Dane would look you in the eye and say, "Denmark is a great country. " You're supposed to figure this out for yourself. It is the land of the silk safety net, where almost half the national budget goes toward smoothing out life's inequalities, and there is plenty of money for schools, day care, retraining programs, job seminars—Danes love seminars: Three days at a study center hearing about waste management is almost as good as a ski trip. It is a culture bombarded by English, in advertising, pop music, the Internet, and despite all the English that Danish absorbs—there is no Danish Academy to defend against it—old dialects persist in Jutland that can barely be understood by Copenhageners. It is the land where, as the saying goes, "Few have too much and fewer have too little," and a foreigner is struck by the sweet egalitarianism that prevails, where the lowliest clerk gives you a level gaze, where Sir and Madame have disappeared from common usage, even Mr. and Mrs. It's a nation of recyclers—about 55% of Danish garbage gets made into something new—and no nuclear power plants. It's a nation of tireless planners. Trains run on time. Things operate well in general. Such a nation of overachievers—a brochure from the Ministry of Business and Industry says, "Denmark is one of the world's cleanest and most organized countries, with virtually no pollution, crime, or poverty. Denmark is the most corruption-free society in the Northern hemisphere. " So, of course, one's heart lifts at any sighting of Danish sleazy: skinhead graffiti on buildings ("Foreigners Out of Denmark!"), broken beer bottles in the gutters, drunken teenagers slumped in the park. Nonetheless, it is an orderly land. You drive through a Danish town, it comes to an end at a stone wall, and on the other side is a field of barley, a nice clean line: town here, country there. It is not a nation of jaywalkers. People stand on the curb and wait for the red light to change, even if it's 2 a. m. and there's not a car in sight. However, Danes don't think of themselves as a waiting-at-2-a, m.-for-the-green-light people—that's how they see Swedes and Germans. Danes see themselves as jazzy people, improvisers, more free spirited than Swedes, but the truth is (though one should not say it) that Danes are very much like Germans and Swedes. Orderliness is a main selling point. Denmark has few natural resources, limited manufacturing capability; its future in Europe will be as a broker, banker, and distributor of goods. You send your goods by container ship to Copenhagen, and these bright, young, English-speaking, utterly honest, highly disciplined people will get your goods around to Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and Russia. Airports, seaports, highways, and rail lines are ultramodern and well-maintained. The orderliness of the society doesn't mean that Danish lives are less messy or lonely than yours or mine, and no Dane would tell you so. You can hear plenty about bitter family feuds and the sorrows of alcoholism and about perfectly sensible people who went off one day and killed themselves. An orderly society cannot exempt its members from the hazards of life. But there is a sense of entitlement and security that Danes grow up with. Certain things are yours by virtue of citizenship, and you shouldn't feel bad for taking what you're entitled to, you're as good as anyone else. The rules of the welfare System are clear to everyone, the benefits you get if you lose your job, the steps you take to get a new one; and the orderliness of the system makes it possible for the country to weather high unemployment and social unrest without a sense of crisis.

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