单选题In recent years there has been a ______ increase in the cost of living; many families have to depend on the federal aids.

单选题As mainstream chip production technology shifts from one generation to the next every three to five years, plants with new technology can make more powerful chips at lower costs, ______plants with outdated equipment, which often cost billions of dollars to build, will be marginalized by the maker.

单选题An action that is Ulavishly/U rewarded as soon as it is performed is well on its way to becoming a habit.

单选题You"ve only got a slight cold. You"ll ______ it in a day or two.

单选题The wind may ______ the palms in Langkawi, but windsurfing is the only way to enjoy it. The waters of Phuket are crystal clear, but windsurfing is the only way to enjoy it. The waters of Phuket are crystal clear, but snorkeling is merely an option.

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单选题The suspect ______ that he had not been in the neighborhood at the time of the crime. A. advocated B. alleged C. addressed D. announced

单选题The temperatures are somewhat lower than the average temperature in May this year.

单选题The single greatest shift in the history of mass-communication technology occurred in the 15th century, and was well described by Victor Hugo in a famous chapter of Notre Dame de Paris. It was a Cathedral. On all parts of the giant building, statuary and stone representations of every kind, combined with huge widows of stained glass, told the stories of the Bible and the saints, displayed the intricacies of Christian theology, adverted to the existence of highly unpleasant demonic winged creatures, referred diplomatically to the majesties of political power, and in addition, by means of bells in bell towers, told time for the benefit of all of Pairs and much of France. It was an awesome engine of communication. Then came the transition to something still more awesome. The new technology of mass communication was portable, could sit on your table, and was easily replicable, and yet, paradoxically, contained more information, more systematically presented, than even the largest of cathedrals. It was the printed book. Though it provided no bells and could not tell time, the over-all superiority of the new invention was unmistakable. In the last ten or twenty years, we have been undergoing a more or less equivalent shift--this time to a new life as a computer-using population. The gain in portability, capability, ease, orderliness, accuracy, reliability, and information-storage over anything achievable by pen scribbling, typewriting, and cabinet filing is recognized by all. The progress for civilization is undeniable and, plainly, irreversible. Yet, just as the book's triumph over the cathedral divided people into two groups, one of which prospered, while the other lapsed into gloom, the computer's triumph has also divided the human race. You have only to bring a computer into a room to see that some people begin at once to buzz with curiosity and excitement, sit down to conduct experiments, ooh and ah at the boxes and beeps, and master the use of the computer or a new program as quickly as athletes playing a delightful new game. But how difficult it is--how grim and frightful!--for the other people, the defeated class, whose temperament does not naturally respond to computers. The machine whirries and glows before them and their faces twitch. They may be splendidly educated, as measured by book-reading, yet their instincts are all wrong, and no amount of manual-studying and mouse-clicking will make them right. Computers require a sharply different set of aptitudes, and, if the aptitudes are missing, little can be done, and misery is guaranteed. Is the computer industry aware that computers have divided mankind into two new, previously unknown classes, the computer personalities and the non-computer personalities? Yes, the industry knows this. Vast stuns have been expended in order to adapt the computer to the limitations of non-computer personalities. Apple's Macintosh, with its zooming animations and pull-down menus and little pictures of life folders and watch faces and trash cans, pointed the way. Such seductions have soothed the apprehensions of a certain number of the computer-averse. This spring, the computer industry's efforts are reaching a culmination of sorts. Microsoft, Bill Gates' giant corporation, is to bring out a program package called Microsoft Bob, designed by Mr. Gates' wife, Melinda French, and intended to render computer technology available even to people who are openly terrified of computers. Bob's principle is to take the several tasks of operating a computer, rename them in a folksy style, and assign to them the images of an ideal room in ideal home, with furniture and bookshelves, and with chummy cartoon helpers ("Friends of Bob") to guide the computer user over the rough spots, and, in that way, simulate an atmosphere that feels nothing like computers.

单选题{{B}}Passage Six{{/B}} "Most episodes of absent-mindedness--forgetting where you lift something or wondering why you just entered a room--are caused by a simple lack of attention," says Schacter, "you are supposed to remember something but you haven't encoded deeply." Encoding, Schacter explains, is a special way of paying attention to an event that has a major impact on recalling it later. Failure to encode properly can create annoying situations. If you put your mobile phone in a pocket, for example, and don't pay attention to what you did because you are involved in a conversation, you'll probably forget that the phone is in the jacket now hanging in your wardrobe. "Your memory itself isn't failing you," says Schacter, "rather you didn't give your memory system the information it needed." Laek of interest can also lead to absent-mindedness. "A man who can recite sports statistics from 30 years ago," says Zelinski, "may not remember to drop a letter in the mailbox.' Women have slightly better memories than men possibly because they pay more attention to their environment and memory relies on just that. "Visual cues can help prevent absent-mindedness." says Schacter. "But be sure the cue is clear and available," he cautions. If you want to remember to take a medication with lunch, put the pill bottle on the kitchen table--don't leave it in the medicine chest and write yourself a note that you keep in a pocket. Another common episode of absent-mindedness like walking into a room and wondering why you're there is most likely because you were thinking about something else. "Everyone does this from time to time,' says Zelinske. The best thing to do is to return to where you were before entering the room and you will likely remember.

单选题EDUCATE: CHILD

单选题Reading to oneself is a modern activity that was almost unknown to the scholars of the classical and medieval worlds, while during the fifteen century the term "reading" undoubtedly meant reading aloud. Only during the nineteenth did silent reading become commonplace. One should be wary, however, of assuming that silent reading came about simply because reading aloud is a distraction to others. Examination of factors related to the historical development of silent reading reveals that it became the usual mode of reading for most adult reading tasks mainly because the tasks themselves changed in character. The last century saw a steady gradual increase in literacy, and thus in the number of readers. As readers increased, the number of potential listeners decreased, and thus there was some reduction in the need to read aloud. Reading for the benefit of listeners grew less common, so came the flourishing of reading as a private activity in such public places as libraries, railway carriages and offices, where reading aloud would cause distraction to other readers. Towards the end of the century there was still considerable argument over whether books should be used for information or treated respectfully, and over whether the reading of material such as newspapers was in some way mentally weakening. Indeed this argument remains with us still in education. However, whatever its virtues were, the old shared literacy culture had gone and was replaced by the printed mass media on the one hand and by book and periodicals for a specialized readership on the other. By the end of the century students were being recommended to adopt attitudes to books and to use skills in reading them which were inappropriate, if not impossible, for the oral reader. The social, cultural and technological changes in the century had greatly altered what the term "reading" implied.

单选题What he expressed as a mere {{U}}supposition{{/U}} was taken by others as a positive statement.

单选题The children will not be allowed to come with us if they don't______ themselves.

单选题"Before, we were too black to be white. Now, we're too white to be black. " Hadija, one of South Africa's 3. 5m Coloured(mixed race)people, sells lace curtains at a street market in a bleak township outside Cape Town. In 1966 she and her family were driven out of District Six, in central Cape Town, by an apartheid government that wanted the area for whites. Most of the old houses and shops were bulldozed but a Methodist church, escaping demolition, has been turned into a little museum, with an old street plan stretched across the floor. On it, families have identified their old houses, writing names and memories in bright felt-tip pen. "We can forgive, but not forget," says one. Up to a point. In the old days, trampled on by whites, they were made to accept a second-class life of scant privileges as a grim reward for being lighter-skinned than the third-class blacks. Today, they feel trampled on by the black majority. The white-led National Party, which still governs the Western Cape, the province where some 80% of Col-oureds live, plays on this fear to good electoral effect. With no apparent irony, the party also appeals to the Coloured sense of common culture with fellow Afrikaans-speaking whites, a link the Nats have spent decades denying. This curious courtship is again in full swing. A municipal election is to be held in the province on May 29th and the Nats need the Coloured vote if they are to win many local councils. By most measures, Coloureds are still better-off than blacks. Their jobless rate is high, 21% according to the most recent figures available. But the black rate is 38%. Their average yearly income is still more than twice that of blacks. But politics turns on fears and aspirations. Most Coloureds fret that affirmative action, the promotion of non-whites into government-related jobs, is leaving them behind. Affirmative action is supposed to help Coloureds(and Indians)too. It often does not. They may get left off a shortlist because, for instance, a job requires the applicant to speak a black African language, such as Xhosa. Some Coloureds think that the only way they will improve their lot is to launch their own, ethnically based, political parties. Last year a group formed the Kleurling Weer-standsbeweging, or Coloured Resistance Movement. But in-fighting caused this to crumble: some members wanted it to promote Coloured interests and culture; others to press for an exclusive "homeland". In fact, the Coloureds' sense of collective identity is undefined, largely imposed by apartheid's twisted logic. They are descended from a mix of races, including the Khoi and San(two indigenous African peoples), Malay slaves imported by the Dutch, and white European settlers. And though they do indeed share much with Afrikaners—many belong to the Dutch Reformed Church and many speak Afrikaans—others speak English or are Muslim or worship spirits. Under apartheid, being Coloured became something to try to escape from. Many tried to pass as white; some succeeded in getting "reclassified". Aspiring to whiteness and fearful of blackness, their identity is hesitant, even defensive. Many Coloureds feel most sure about what they are not; they vigorously resist any attempt to use the term "black" to embrace all nonwhite people. "My people are terrible racists, but not by choice," says Joe Marks, a Coloured member of the Western Cape parliament. "The blacks today have the political power, the whites have economic power. We just have anger. "

单选题He has never failed to take the ______ in dealing with other people. [A] action [B] initiation [C] beginning [D] initiative

单选题In some countries preschool education in nursery schools or kindergartens ______ the 1st grade.(2002年3月中国科学院考博试题)

单选题The main feature of a convention--a pattern of behavior that is customary, expected, and self-enforced--is that, out of a host of conceivable choices, only one is actually used. This fact also explains why conventions are needed: they resolve problems of indeterminacy in interactions that have multiple equilibria. Indeed, from a forma point of view, we may define a convention as an equilibrium that everyone expects in interactions that have more than one equilibrium. The economic significance of conventions is that they reduce transaction costs. Imagine the inconvenience if, whenever two vehicles approached one another, the drivers had to get out and negotiate which side of the road to take. Or consider the cost of having to switch freight from one type of railroad to another whenever a journey involves both a wide-gauge and a narrow-gauge railroad line. This was a common circumstance in the nineteenth century and not unknown in the late twentieth: until recently, Australia had different rail gauges in the states of South Wales and Victoria, forcing a mechanical switch for all trains bound between Sydney and Melbourne. Conventions are also a notable feature of legal contracts. People rely on standard leases, wills, purchasing agreements, construction contracts and the like, because it is less costly to fill in the blanks of a standard contract than to Create one from scratch. Even more important, such agreements are backed up by legal precedent, so the signatories have even greater confidence that, their terms are enforceable. We may discern two ways in which conventions become established. One is by central authority. Following the French Revolution, for example, it was decreed that horse-drawn carriages in Paris should keep to the right. The previous custom had been for carriages to keep left and for pedestrians to keep right, facing the oncoming traffic. Changing the custom was symbolic of the new order going on the left had become politically incorrect because it was identified with the privileged classes; going on the right was the habit of the common many and therefore-more "democratic." In Britain, by contrast there seems to have been no single defining event that gave rise to the dominant convention of left-handed driving. Rather, it grew up by local custom, spreading from one region to another. This is the second mechanism by which conventions become established: the gradual accretion of precedent. The two mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, of course. Society often converges on a convention first by an informal process of accretion; later it is codified into law to regulate exceptions. In many countries, rules of the road were not legislated until the nineteenth century, but by this time the law was merely reiterating what had already become established custom. The surprising fact is that until the end of the eighteenth century, the dominant convention was for horse-drawn carriages to keep to the left. This situation obtained in Great Britain, France, Sweden, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and parts of Italy. A chain of historical accidents--Napoleon adopting the new convention for his armies and imposing this convention in occupied countries; Portugal sharing a common border with occupied Spain; Austria, Hungary and Bohemian Czechoslovakia falling under German rule; Italy having elected a "modern" leader under a king--gradually tipped the balance.

单选题The disagreement over the trade restrictions could seriously ______ relations between the two countries.