单选题A crowd of people gathered, ______ by the way the police officers were hitting the two men.

单选题The French word renaissance means rebirth. It was first used in 1855 by the historian Jules Michelet in his History of France, then adopted by historians of culture, by art historians, and eventually by music historians, all of whom applied it to European culture during the 150 years spanning 1450-1600. The concept of rebirth was appropriate to this period of European history because of the renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture that began in Italy and then spread throughout Europe. Scholars and artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries wanted to restore the learning and ideals of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. To these scholars this meant a return to human—as opposed to spiritual—values. Fulfillment in life—as opposed to concern about an afterlife—became a desirable goal, and expressing the entire range of human emotions and enjoying the pleasures of the senses were no longer frowned on. Artists and writers now turned to secular as well as religious subject matter and sought to make their works understandable and appealing. These changes in outlook deeply affected the musical culture of the Renaissance period—how people thought about music as well as the way music was composed, experienced, discussed, and disseminated. They could see the architectural monuments, sculptures, plays, and poems that were being rediscovered, but they could not actually hear ancient music—although they could read the writings of classical philosophers, poets, essayists, and music theorists that were becoming available in translation. They learned about the power of ancient music to move the listener and wondered why modem music did not have the same effect. For example, the influential religious leader Bernardino Cirillo expressed disappointment with the learned music of his time. He urged musicians to follow the example of the sculptors, painters, architects, and scholars who had rediscovered ancient art and literature. The musical Renaissance in Europe was more a general cultural movement and state of mind than a specific set of musical techniques. Furthermore, music changed so rapidly during this century and a half-though at different rates in different countries—that we cannot define a single Renaissance style.

单选题{{B}}Passage Four{{/B}} Public speaking fills most people with dread. Humiliation is the greatest fear; self-exposure and failing to appeal to the audience come a close second. Women hate it most, since girls are pressurized from an early age to be concerned with appearances of all kinds. Most people have plenty of insecurities, and this seems like a situation that will bring them out. If parents, teachers or peers mocked your foibles as a child, you fear a repeat. If you were under pressure to be perfect, you are terrified of failing in the most public of ways. While extroverts will feel less fear before the ordeal, it does not mean they will necessarily do it better. Some very shy people manage to shine. In fact, personality is not the best predictor of who does it well. Regardless of what you are like in real life, the key seems to be to act yourself. Actual acting, as in performing the scripted lines of a character other than yourself, does not do the job. While politicians may limit damage by having carefully rehearsed, written screeds to speak from, there is always a hidden awareness among the audience that the words might not be true. Although, as Earl Spencer proved at his sister Princess Diana's funeral, it is possible both to prepare every word and to act naturally. In script rarely works and it is used as a crutch by most people. But, being yourself doesn't work either. If you spoke as if you were in your own kitchen, it would be too authentic, too unaware of the need to communicate with an audience. I remember going to see British psychiatrist RD Laing speak in public. He behaved like a seriously odd person, talking off the top of his head. Although he was talking about madness and he wrote on mental illness, he seemed to be exhibiting rather than explaining it. The best psychological place from which to speak is an unselfconscious self-consciousness, providing the illusion of being natural. Studies suggest that this state of "flow", as psychologists call it, is very satisfying. Whether in normal life or making speeches, the key is to remind yourself that, contrary to what your teachers or parents may have implied, your best is good enough. In the zone, a strange place of authentic falsehood and shallow depth, play is possible.

单选题In your teens,peer-group friendships may _____from parents as the major influence on you.

单选题The Austrian manufacturing industry consists of a few large organizations, many of which operate under government auspices. A. supervision B. orientation C. regulation D. sponsorship

单选题The relationship between formal education and economic growth in poor countries is widely misunderstood by economists and politicians alike. Progress in both areas is undoubtedly necessary for the social, political and intellectual development of these and all other societies, however, the conventional view that education should be one of the very highest priorities for promoting rapid economic development in poor countries is wrong. We are fortunate that it is, because building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance would require two or three generations. The findings of a research institution have consistently shown that workers in all countries can be trained on the job to achieve radical higher productivity and, as a result, radically higher standards of living. Ironically, the first evidence for this idea appeared in the United States. Not long ago, with the country entering a recession and Japan at its pre-bubble peak. The U.S. workforce was derided as poorly educated and one of primary cause of the poor U.S. economic performance. Japan was, and remains, the global leader in automotive-assembly productivity. Yet the research revealed that the U.S. factories of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota achieved about 95 percent of the productivity of their Japanese counterparts—a result of the training that U.S. workers received on the job. More recently, while examining housing construction, the researchers discovered that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican workers in Houston, Texas, consistently met best-practice labor productivity standards despite the complexity of the building industry"s work. What is the real relationship between education and economic development? We have to suspect that continuing economic growth promotes the development of education even when governments don"t force it. After all, that"s how education got started. When our ancestors were hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago, they didn"t have time to wonder much about anything besides finding food. Only when humanity began to get its food in a more productive way was there time for other things. As education improved, humanity"s productivity potential increased as well. When the competitive environment pushed our ancestors to achieve that potential, they could in turn afford more education. This increasingly high level of education is probably a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the complex political systems required by advanced economic performance. Thus poor countries might not be able to escape their poverty traps without political changes that may be possible only with broader formal education. A lack of formal education, however, doesn"t constrain the ability of the developing world"s workforce to substantially improve productivity to the forested future. On the contrary, constraints on improving productivity explain why education isn"t developing more quickly there than it is.

单选题With the US economy slowing down, layoffs are everywhere. No industry is spared. If you end up having to start over, in addition to starting your job search, there are several things you should take care of to make your transition a smooth one. First and foremost, clear up any misunderstanding about how and why you left your last job with your ex-boss. Whether you left voluntarily, were fired or were laid off due to budget cutbacks, make sure you both have the same explanation. Agree on job titles accordingly. Also ask for a reference if you think your ex-boss will offer one and you trust that he or she will speak honestly about your performance. You should have a source of emergency cash that you can use in the interim. Don't panic and liquidate your stocks and bonds just yet, be optimistic in your prospects while also be more frugal than usual. You should save money on not having to dry-clean work clothes so often and eating less take-out lunches. Save money by not eating out at restaurants and watch videos rather than going to the movies every weekend. Make a note of your job hunting expenses, such as career counselors' consulting fees and resume printing costs, and save the receipts. By next year's tax-filing time, you could get deductions on your job-search expense (unless you left a job willingly or was a college graduate looking for your first job). Most companies terminate your medical insurance coverage as soon as you stop working for them. But it doesn't mean you have to forgo medical coverage altogether. There is something called Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) in the United States that legally protects an ex-employee's right to stay in the company's health care plan. However, the company will stop paying your premiums, and you will have to pay out of your pocket the expenses. This is still a good option compared to no health insurance at all. Another important thing to take care of when you change jobs is your 401 (k) account. A 401 (k) is the retirement fund that most companies offer. It's named after section 401 (k) in the Internal Revenue Service's policy documents. You put aside a percentage of your paycheck each pay period, and the money accumulated will be managed by the 401 (k) fund manager your employer has hired and is invested in the stock market. You cannot withdraw money from this account until you reach this age, or you will incur penalties. When you leave a job, the money can sometimes be kept with your ex-employer for a while. It's always a good idea to compare your new employer's 401 (k) plan with your old one. Every company offers different types of investment options, from overseas stocks to high- tech stocks and everything in between. If you do want to transfer the account to your new employer, you need to go to the human resources department and ask for forms that help you make the transition. Don't forget to ask for job leads from your ex-coworkers. Even if you are leaving for a job in another industry, you never know what people they happen to know that can help with your job search. Keep in touch with the friends you have made at your old job. Remember to anchor yourself to people, not institutions, and you will find that any transition is made easier.

单选题 In most corners of the world malnutrition is plainly a matter of outright insufficiency of food for the population--where the majority of the people do not obtain enough food calories to meet minimal needs for support of physical work and for maintenance of health. Elsewhere the problem may be not one of insufficient, calories but of lack of specific nutrients essential for health. In Latin America, as in other places, the dread protein deficiency disease kwashiorkor is taking its heavy toll of children's lives. Strategic vitamins and minerals may be lacking due to traditional diets which are nutritionally imbalanced. Here people continue their eating pattern year after year without knowledge of that their dietary habits are doing to themselves and to future generations. With a basic knowledge of nutritional needs and deficiencies, efforts could be directed to finding food substitutes which could meet these needs. Mixtures of vegetable proteins, like soybeans and peanuts, could provide an abundance of cheap, useful protein where meat, eggs, and milk are not within economic reach of large groups in the population. Efforts could also be expended on increasing the agricultural productivity in specific regions; where large areas are given over to relatively inefficient use as grazing land, the intensive production of vegetable protein crops could bring remedial nutrition to an undernourished population. Elsewhere, enrichment with specific vitamins and minerals of traditional staple foods that are deficient in essential nutritive factors could wipe out disabling deficiency diseases, like beriberi or pellagra, almost overnight. Similarly, addition of minute amounts of inexpensive iodine to salt could benefit large areas where endemic goiter has been accepted as an integral part of life for generations.

单选题The letter page of this newspaper is a ______ for public argument. A. symposium B. commentary C. forum D. appraisal

单选题From the passage, which of the following is NOT included in the disadvantages of living in a big city?

单选题 Ever since this government's term began, the attitude to teachers has been overshadowed by the mantra that good teachers cannot be rewarded if it means bad teachers are rewarded, too. That's why, despite the obvious need for them, big pay rises have not been awarded to teachers across the board. The latest pay rise was 3.6 per cent--mad in the present situation. That's why, as well, the long battle over performance-related pay was fought as teacher numbers slid. The idea is that some kind of year zero can eventually be achieved whereby all the bad teachers are gone and only the good teachers remain. That is why the Government's attempts to relieve the teacher shortage have been so focused on offering incentives to get a new generation of teachers into training. The assumption is that so many of the teachers we have already are bad, that only by starting again can standards be raised. But the teacher shortage is not caused only because of a lack of new teachers coming into the profession. It is also because teaching has a retention problem, with many leaving the profession. These people have their reasons for doing so, which cannot be purely about wanting irresponsibly to "abandon" pupils more permanently. Such an exodus suggests that even beyond the hated union grandstanding, teachers are not happy. Unions and government appear to be in broad agreement that the shortage of teachers is a parlous state of affairs. Oddly, though, they don't seem entirely to agree that the reasons for this may lie in features of the profession itself and the way it is run. Instead, the Government is so suspicious of the idea that teachers may be able to represent themselves, that they have set up the General Teaching Council, a body that will represent teachers whether they want it to or not, and to which they have to pay ￡ 25 a year whether they want to or not. The attitudes of both sides promise to exacerbate rather than solve the problem. Teachers are certainly exacerbating the problem by stressing just how bad things are. Quite a few potential teachers must be put off. And while the Government has made quite a success of convincing the public that bad education is almost exclusively linked to bad teachers represented by destructive unions, it also seems appalling that in a survey last year, working hours for primary teachers averaged 53 hours per week, while secondary teachers clocked up 51 hours. At their spring conferences, the four major teaching unions intend to ballot their members on demanding from government an independent inquiry into working conditions. This follows the McCrone report in Scotland, which produced an agreement to limit hours to 35 per week, with a maximum class contact-time of 22 and a half hours. That sounds most attractive.

单选题What is NOT containde in the big book used by American students in applying to a college?

单选题He ______ spends his holidays in the mountains though occasionally he goes to the seaside instead.

单选题It can be concluded that the writer's grandfather's family purchased their land ______.

单选题Although it is only a small business, its______is surprisingly high.

单选题Tom Jones, who ______ around the world, will come to Asia next month.

单选题The meal was excellent; the sour-pepper soup was particularly ______. A. addicted B. delicious C. tasteful D. desirable

单选题Fear and its companion pain are two of the most useful things that men and animals possess, if they are properly used. If fire did not hurt when it burnt, children would play it until their hands were burnt away. Similarly, if pain existed but fear did not, a child would burn itself again and again, because fear would not warn it to keep away from the fire that had burn it before. A really fearless soldier-and some do exist-is not a good soldier because he is soon killed; and a dead soldier is of no use to his army. Fear and pain are therefore two guards without which men and animals might soon die out. In our first sentence we suggested that fear ought to be properly used. if, for example, you never go out of your house because of the danger of being knocked down and killed in the street by a car, you are letting fear rule you too much. Even in your house you are not absolutely safe: an airplane may crash on your house, or ants may eat away some of the beams in your roof so that the latter falls on you, or you may get cancer! The important thing is not to let fear rule you, but instead to use fear as your servant and guide. Fear will warn you of dangers; then you have to decide what action to take. In many cases, you can take quick and successful action to avoid the danger. For example, you see a car coming straight towards you; fear warns you, you jump out of the way, and all is well. In some cases, however, you decide that there is nothing that you can do to avoid the danger. For example, you cannot prevent an airplane crashing onto your house. In this case, fear has given you its warning; you have examined it and decided on your course, of action, so fear of this particular danger is no longer of any use to you, and you have to try to overcome it.