单选题The candidate's speech was filled with empty promises, ______ and cliches.

单选题In most American cities, the rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $250 or more per month in recent years. In some smaller cities such as Louisville, Kentucky or Jacksonville, Florida the rent was less, but in larger cities it was more. For example, if you lived in Los Angeles, you had to pay $400 or more to rent a one-bedroom apartment, and the same apartment rented for $625 and up in Chicago. The most expensive rents in the U. S. were in New York City, where you had to pay at least $700 a month to rent a one-bedroom apartment in most parts of the city. Renters and city planners are worried about the high cost of renting apartments. Many cities now have rent control laws to keep the cost of renting low. These laws help low-income families who cannot pay high rents. Rent controls in the United States began in 1943 when the government imposed rent controls on all American cities to help workers and the families of soldiers during World War Ⅱ. After the war, only one city—New York—continued these World War Ⅱ controls. Recently, more and more cities have returned to rent controls. At the beginning of the 1980s, nearly one fifth of the people in the United States lived in cities with rent-control laws. Many cities have rent-control laws, but why are rents so high? Builders and landlords blame rent controls for the high rents. Rents are high because there are not enough apartments to rent, and they blame rent controls for the shortage of apartments. Builders want more money to build more apartment buildings, and landlords want more money to repair their old apartment buildings. But they cannot increase rents to get this money because of the rent-control laws. As a result, landlords are not repairing their old apartments, and builders are not building new apartment buildings to replace the old apartment buildings. Builders are building apartments for high-income families, not low income families, so low-income families must live in old apartments that are in disrepair. Builders and landlords claim that rent-control laws really hurt low income families. Many renters disagree with them. They say that rent control is not the problem. Even without rent controls, builders and landlords will continue to ignore low-income housing because they can make more money from high-income housing. The only answer, they claim, is more rent controls and government help for low-income housing.

单选题PERPLEXED: CLARIFICATION

单选题The farmers were more anxious for rain than the people in the city because they had more at ______. A. danger B. stake C. loss D. threat

单选题Passage 2 Low-level slash-and-bum farming doesn't harm rainforest. On the contrary, it helps farmers and improves forest soils. This is the unorthodox view of a German soil scientist who has shown that burnt clearings in the Amazon, dating back more than 1 000 years, helped create patches of rich, fertile soil that farmers still benefit from today. Most rainforest soils are thin and poor because they lack minerals and because the heat and heavy rainfall destroy most organic matter in the soils within four years of it reaching the forest floor. This means topsoil contains few of the ingredients needed for long-term successful farming. But Bruno Glaser, a soil scientist of the University of Bayreuth, has studied unexpected patches of fertile soils in the central Amazon. These soils contain lots of organic matter. Glaser has shown that most of this fertile organic matter comes from "black carbon"—the organic particles from camp fires and charred (烧成炭的) wood left over from thousands of years of slash-and-burn faring." The soils, known as Terra Preta, contained up to 70 times more black carbon than the surrounding soil," says Glaser. Unbumt vegetation rots quickly, but black carbon persists in the soil for many centuries. Radiocarbon dating shows that the charred wood in Terra Preta soils is typically more than 1000 years old. "Slash-and-burn farming can be good for soils provided it doesn't completely burn all the vegetation, and leaves behind charred wood," says Glaser. "It can be better than manure (粪肥) ." Burning the forest just once can leave behind enough black carbon to keep the soil fertile for thousands of years. And rainforests easily regrow after small-scale clearing. Contrary to the conventional view that human activities damage the environment, Glaser says,"black carbon combined with human wastes is responsible for the richness of Terra Preta soils." Terra Preta soils turn up in large patches all over the Amazon, where they are highly prized by farmers. All the patches fall within 500 square kilometers in the central Amazon. Glaser says the widespread presence of pottery confirms the soil's human origins. The findings add weight to the theory that large areas of the Amazon have recovered so well from past periods of agricultural use that the regrowth has been mistaken by generations of biologists for "virgin" forest. During the past decade, researchers have discovered hundreds of large earth works deep in the jungle. They are up to 20 meters high and cover up to a square kilometer. Glaser claims that these earth works, built between AD 400 and 1400, were at the heart of urban civilizations. Now it seems the richness of the Terra Preta soils may explain how such civilizations managed to feed themselves.

单选题 Some recent developments in photography allow animals to be studied in previously inaccessible places and in unprecedented detail.

单选题On weekends my grandpa usually ______ a glass of wine.

单选题Hague was elected as the Conservative Party leader partly because of his ambiguous views on Britain"s position in relation to its partners in the European Union.

单选题The frequent ______ from cold to warm weather this spring have caused much illness.

单选题 There are three general methods people use to explain and understand their world, beliefs, pseudoscience, and science. What are beliefs? Well, simply put, beliefs are what you believe to be true. In this first method of interpreting man and the world, certain people proved the information about how the world works. Their teachings are beyond question. Their followers accept these beliefs because they want to accept them, not because of scientific evidence. Some examples are religions, such as Christianity. Christians believe in one God. who created the universe and all that is in it. They believe that this God is active in history, guiding and teaching His people. Like many religions, Christianity provides a number of specific moral rules and principles that make up an important part of its teachings. Superstitions, such as Fung Shui, are also common examples of beliefs. Pseudoscience, also called fake science, is any body or knowledge, methodology, belief, or practice that claims to be scientific or is made to appear scientific, but is actually not. In pseudoscience, people accept opinions, or choose to believe certain facts while intentionally ignoring others, resulting in a false understanding of things and events. Beliefs in magic, monsters, and ghosts fall into this category. Both Chinese Qigong and Indian Yoga are very good physical exercises that can help their practitioners keep fit, but when some magical power, they are turning Qigong or Yoga into pseudoscience. Many people follow pseudoscience be-cause belief in magic or mysterious powers is entertaining. Astrology has millions of followers all around the world, not because it helps them deal with the world in any better way, only because it is just fun. Of the three methods, only science provides a rational way of understanding the world. It does not provide a moral system as religion does and it may not always be as entertaining as pseudoscience sometimes is, but it is the only method that requires constant testing of facts, beliefs and ideas, resulting in changing theories as we get new information. Science teaches us to draw conclusions based on evidence and it also teaches us that some evidence is stronger than other evidence, and how to judge the evidence. Through our study of science, we learn to accept uncertainty, to question facts and theories, and to search constantly for truth. Most of us use all three methods in different proportions to view our world. Some scientists believe in theories without supporting evidence. And the scientific method is often used for unscientific purposes. But science is the only method that is constantly changing. It does not depend on the teachings of one man. Each scientist builds on the work of others and his findings, in turn, are used by others to increase our knowledge of the world.

单选题 The goal of this training program is to raise children with a sense of responsibility and necessary courage to be willing to take on challenges in life.

单选题Early in the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon proposed that science consisted in the elevation of the authority of experiment and observation over that of reason, intuition, and convention. Bacon thought that as more and more reliable and precise particular facts accumulate, they can be classified and generalized, resulting in an ever-expanding hierarchy of useful "axioms". This is what he meant by "induction". Although many people today continue to regard the collection of facts and their arrangement by induction into theories as the heart of scientific method, Bacon's conception of what facts and theories are and of the relationship between them was hopelessly unrealistic even in his own time. The most important early scientific discoveries — such as those made by Galileo about the movement of the earth, by Keppler about the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, and later by Newton about the "force" of gravity — could never have been made if Bacon's rules had prevailed. Determined to avoid all premature speculations, Bacon proposed that data gathering be carried out by illiterate assistants with no interest in whether an experiment turned out one way or another. Plain facts, properly arranged, would automatically lead to certain knowledge of the universe. Nothing could be more misrepresentative of the actual problem-solving techniques of the scientific method. That plain facts do not speak for themselves is evident from Bacon's own acceptance of the errors contained in what appeared to be the most "obvious" of facts. For Bacon, that the earth did not move was a fact because it could be seen not to move; and for Bacon it was a fact that life was being spontaneously generated because maggots always developed in putrid flesh and frogs appeared after every rain. What is clear is that the great breakthroughs of Newton, Darwin, or Marx could never have been achieved solely on the basis of Baconian fact gathering. Facts are always unreliable without theories which guide their collection and which distinguish between superficial and significant appearances.

单选题Watch a baby between six and nine months old, and you will observe the basic concept of geometry being learned. Once the baby has mastered the idea that space is three dimensional, itreaches out and begins grasping various kinds of objects. It is then, from perhaps nine to fifteen months, that the concepts of sets and numbers are formed. So far, so good. But now an ominous development takes place. The nerve fibers in the brain insulate themselves in such a way that the baby begins to hear sounds very precisely. Soon it picks up language, and it is then brought into direct communication with adults. From this point on, it is usually downhill all the way for mathematics, because the child now becomes exposed to all the nonsense words and beliefs of the community into which it has been so unfortunate as to have been born. Nature, having done very well by the child to this point, having permitted it the luxury of thinking for itself for eighteen months, now abandons it to the arbitrary conventions and beliefs of society. But at least the child knows something of geometry and numbers; and it will always retain some memory of the early halcyon days, no matter what vicissitudes it may suffer later on. The main reservoir of mathematical talent in any society is thus possessed by children who are about two years old, children who have just learned to speak fluently.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} For scientists who study human evolution, fossil remains provide the only direct evidence of our ancient ancestors. Access to these paleoanthropological Rosetta stones, how- ever, is limited by protective curators who are often reluctant to lend the fragile fossils. And in the case of fossil skulls, nature preserves critical information in the largely in- accessible interior. But help is on the way. At the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Salt Lake City this past April, researchers discussed how medical imaging, virtual reality and computer-controlled modelling technologies get around these obstacles noninvasively. Three-dimensional medical imaging based on computed tomography (CT) scans was developed in the early 1980s. On a computer, surgeons could electronically remove the patient's soft tissue and then explore the virtual skull inside and out before operating. It wasn't long before Glenn Conroy of Washington University and his colleagues demonstrated that these same techniques could also be applied to fossils, in which sediments take the place of soft tissue. With advances in computer graphics and computational power, paleoanthropologists can now perform on their computers a wide range of investigations that are impossible to attempt on the original fossil. Missing features on one Side of the skull can be re-created by mirroring the preserved features (postmortem deformations can be similarly rectified) and tiny, hidden structures such as the inner ear can be magnified for closer examination. Moreover, as Christoph P. E. Zollikofer and Marcias Ponce de Leon of the University of Zurich and others have shown, anthropologists can reconstruct fragmented fossils on-screen. The standard repertoire of measurements can also be made virtually, in most cases with the same degree of accuracy afforded by handheld calipers. And with the creation of a virtual "endocast", brain volume can be determined reliably. In fact, Conroy's recent re- Search has revealed a major discrepancy between the estimated and actual brain volume of an early hominid called Stw 505 (or Mr. Pies). Conroy suspects that the estimated cranial capacity of some other fossils might also be incorrect--a hunch that, if substantiated, could have important implications for our understanding of brain evolution.

单选题It is these skills that ______ are being neglected in the arguments over ambiguity and the setting of guidelines for sound research practices.

单选题The growth of cell-phone users in the U.S. has tapered off from the breakneck pace of 50% annually in the late 1990s to what analysts project will be a 15% to 20% rise in 2002, and no more than that in 2003. To some extent, numerous surveys have found, slower growth in demand reflects consumer disillusionment with just about every aspect of cell-phone service—its reliability, quality, and notorious customer service. The cooling off in demand threatens to cascade through the industry: The big four U.S. cell-phone carders—Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless, Sprint imperil their timetables for becoming profitable, not to mention their efforts to whittle down their mountains of debt. As the carders have begun to cut costs, wireless- equipment makers—companies such as Lucent, Nokia, and Ericsson—have been left with a market that's bound to be smaller than they had anticipated. Handset makers have been insulated so far, but they, too, face a nagging uncertainty. They'll soon introduce advanced phones to the U.S. market that will run on the new networks the carders are starting up over the next year or two. But the question then will be: Will Americans embrace these snazzy data features—and their higher costs—with the wild enthusiasm that Europeans and Asians have? Long before the outcome in clear, the industry will have to adopt a new mind-set. "In the old days, it was all about connectivity." says Andrew Cole, an analyst with wireless consultancy Adventis. Build the network, and customers will come. From now on, the stakes will be higher. The new mantra: Please customers, or you may not survive. To work their way out of this box, the carders are spending huge sums to address the problem. Much of Sprint PCS's $ 3.4 billion in capital outlays this year will be for new stations. And in fact, the new high-speed, high-capacity nationwide networks due to roll out later this year should help ease the calling-capacity crunch that has caused many consumer complaints. In the meantime, some companies are using better training and organization to keep customers happy. The nation's largest rural operator, Alltel (AT), recently reorganized its call centers so that a customer's query goes to the first operator who's available anywhere in the country, instead of the first one available in the customer's home area. That should cut waiting time to one minute from three to five minutes previously.

单选题Happy______they were, there was something missing.