单选题If nothing is done to protect the environment, millions of species that are alive today will have become ______.

单选题The doctor tried to find a {{U}}tactful{{/U}} way of telling her the truth.

单选题The view from the 23rd floor of the sleek tower on Barcelona's Avenida Diagonal ______ opaquely as summer smog oozes across the Olympic landscape below. A. subtracts B. shimmers C. simulates D. repents

单选题Can the Internet help patients jump the line at the doctor's office? The Silicon Valley Employers Forum, a sophisticated group of technology companies, is launching a pilot program to test online "virtual visits" between doctors at three big local medical groups and about 6,000 employees and their families. The six employers taking part in the Silicon Valley initiative, including heavy hitters such as Oracle and Cisco Systems, hope that online visits will mean employees won't have to skip work to tend to minor ailments or to follow up on chronic conditions. "With our long commutes and traffic, driving 40 miles to your doctor in your hometown can be a big chunk of time," says Cindy Conway, benefits director at Cadence Design Systems, one of the participating companies. Doctors aren't clamoring to chat with patients online for free; they spend enough unpaid time on the phone. Only 1 in 5 has ever E-mailed a patient, and just 9 percent are interested in doing so, according to the research firm Cyber Dialogue. "We are not stupid," says Stifling Somers, executive director of the Silicon Valley employers group. "Doctors getting paid is a critical piece in getting this to work." In the pilot program, physicians will get $ 20 per online consultation, about what they get for a simple office visit. Doctors also fear they'll be swamped by rambling E-mails that tell everything but what's needed to make a diagnosis. So the new program will use technology supplied by Healinx, an Alameda, Calif-based start-up. Healinx' s "Smart Symptom Wizard" questions patients and. turns answers into a succinct message. The company has online dialogues for 60 common conditions. The doctor can then diagnose the problem and outline a treatment plan, which could include E-mailing a prescription or a face-to-face visit. Can E-mail replace the doctor's office? Many conditions, such as persistent cough, require stethoscope to discover what's wrong and to avoid a malpractice suit. Even Larry Bonham, head of one of the doctor's groups in the pilot, believes the virtual doctor's visits offer a "very narrow" sliver of service between phone calls to an advice nurse and a visit to the clinic. The pilot program, set to end in nine months, also hopes to determine whether online visits will boost worker productivity enough to offset the cost of the service. So far, the Internet's record in the health field has been underwhelming. The experiment is "a huge roll of the dice for Healing", notes Michael Barrett, an analyst at Internet consulting firm Forester Research. If the "Web visits" succeed, expect some HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) to pay for online visits. If doctors, employers, and patients aren't satisfied, figure on one more E-health start-up to stand down.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} Recent changes in federal government priorities have seen a reduction in financial support for parents who use childcare. This is occurring at a time when there is increasing social and financial pressure on parents, particularly mothers, to work. The issue of childcare and working mothers has been the subject of dispute for some time. Many argue that the best place for children is always in their own homes with their own parents. However, it is my contention that there are many advantages to be had from using childcare and the government should provide more financial assistance to parents who do so. It has been argued that children who attend childcare centers at an early age miss out an important early learning that occurs in parent-child interaction. These children, so this argument goes, may be educationally disadvantaged later in life. However, childcare center may actually assist children in their early learning. They give children an opportunity to mix with other children and to develop social skills at an early age. Indeed, a whole range of learning occurs in childcare centers. Another argument against the use of childcare facilities is that children can be emotionally deprived in these facilitates compared to the home. This argument assumes that the best place for children is to be at their parents', especially mothers', side for twenty-four hours a day. It claims that children's emotional development can be damaged when they are left in childcare facilities. However, parents and children need to spend some time apart. Moreover, children became less dependent on their parents and parents themselves are less stressed and more effective care-givers when there are periods of separation. In fact, recent studies indicate that the parent-child relationship can be improved by the use of high-quality childcare facilities. It could further be asserted that the government and the economy as a whole cannot afford the enormous cost involved in supporting childcare for working parents. However, working parents actually contribute to the national economy. They are able to utilize their productive skills and pay income tax, while non-working parents can become a drain on the tax system through dependent spouse and other rebates. In conclusion, government support for childcare services assists individual families and is important for the economic well-being of the whole nation.

单选题 Despite his doctor's note of caution, he never ______ from drinking and smoking.

单选题The study shows that laying too much emphasis on exams is likely to ______ students’ enthusiasm in learning English. A. hold back B. hold off C. hold down D. adopt

单选题Parents of wailing(哀号)babies, take comfort: You are not alone. Chimpanzee babies fuss. Sea gull chicks squawk. Burying beetle larvae tap their parents' legs. Throughout the animal kingdom, babies know how to get their parents' attention. Exactly why evolution has produced all this fussing, squawking and tapping is a question many biologists are trying to answer. Someday, that answer may shed some light on the mystery of crying in human babies. " It may point researchers in the right direction to find the cause of excessive crying," said Joseph Soltis, a bioacoustics expert at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista. Florida. Soltis published an article on the evolution of crying in the current issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Young animals vary in how much they cry, squawk or otherwise communicate with their parents, and studies with mice, beetles and monkeys show that this variation is partly based on genes. Some level of crying in humans, of course, is based on gas pains and messy diapers. But as for the genetic contribution, you might expect that natural selection would favor genes for noisier children, since they would get more attention. Before long, however, this sort of deception may be ruinous. If the signals of offspring became totally unreliable, parents would no longer benefit from paying attention. Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that natural selection should therefore favor so-called honest advertisements. Some biologists have speculated that these honest advertisements may not just tell a parent which offspring are hungry. They might also show their parent that they are healthy and vigorous and therefore worth some extra investment. The babies of monkeys cry out to their mothers and tend to cry even more around the time their mothers wean(断奶)them. The mothers, in response, begin to ignore most of their babies' distress calls, since most turn out to be false alarms. " Initially, mothers respond any time an infant cries," said Dado Maestripieri, a primatologist at the University of Chicago. "But as the cries increase, they respond less and less. They become more skeptical. So infants start crying less. So they go through these cycles, adjusting their responses. " Kim Bard, a primatologist at the University of Plymouth in England, has spent more than a decade observing chimpanzee babies. "Chimps can cry for a long time if something terrible is happening to them, but when you pick them up, they stop," Bard said. "I've never seen any chimpanzees in the first three months of life be inconsolable. " Maestripieri and other researchers say these evolutionary forces may have also shaped the cries of human babies. "All primate infants cry. " Maestripieri said. "It's a very conserved behavior. It's not something humans have evolved on their own. "

单选题Restrained from the slave-trade—the favorite traffic of the chiefs—A(opposed in) their marauding propensity, and threatened by the desertion of their slaves and women, who begin to understand that by flight into the towns of the Republic they can free themselves from the domestic institutions of slavery and polygamy, B( it is not probable that) heathen princes and chiefs would be favorable to the government C(which they imagine is operating) detrimentally in these respects toD( its interest).

单选题The word hospice is hundreds of years old. It comes to us from the time called the Middle Ages in Europe. Religious groups then provided hospice as a place where traveler could stay. Sometimes the groups also offered a place for the sick and the dying. Today the word hospice means more than a place. It means a way of caring for the dying. In the modern sense of the word, it means that, if possible, dying people can receive care at home during their last days; and the health-care workers do not try to lengthen the lives of the dying with modern medical equipment. Instead, care-givers make every effort to control or stop the patient's pain. It also means that patients get help for their emotional needs in addition to their physical needs. A British woman Cicely Saunders was the first major activist for hospice care in modern times. Cicely Saunders worked as a nurse in a hospital right after World War II , where she met a man who was dying of cancer. Together they found ideas about the best possible treatment for people who would never get well again. They talked about treatments that would permit patients to discuss their feelings and to take part in activities meaningful to them. They planned a system that would allow dying people to be surrounded by the people and things they loved most. The dying man gave Cicely Saunders enough money to study to become a doctor. By 1967 Dr. Saunders had organized and opened St. Christopher's Hospice in London. In 1974, after the America's first hospice started in New Haven, others followed suit in cities throughout the country. Organizers had a difficult job. They had to teach the public about the idea of hospice. They had to get money from companies, religious groups and citizens. And they had to negotiate with local govermments to use public money to care for the dying. Thanks to their unyielding determination and painstaking efforts, hospice has grown in America. Dr. Jo Magno, the President of the National Hospice Organization, said that working with the dying occasionally made her sad. Yet she remembers the words of Dr. Cicely Saunders— "We can not add days to life, but we can add life to days. "

单选题With scholars from 24 countries______the conference, the committee had a great deal of work to do.

单选题In 1982, Hitachi was indicted for stealing confidential documents from IBM. As part of a court settlement, the company paid IBM hundreds of millions of dollars.

单选题In order to survive now and ______ in the future, all the working staff must constantly create new ideas for every aspect of your business.

单选题Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so ______ at handling people that he was made American Ambassador to France. A. adroit B. shrewd C. considerate D. foxy

单选题Hitler sought to annihilate resistance movements throughout Europe.

单选题 You hear the refrain all the time: the U. S. economy looks good statistically, but it doesn't fed good. Why doesn't ever-greater wealth promote ever-greater happiness.'? It is a quest, ion that dales at least to the appearance in 1958 of The affluent(富裕的)Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently at 97. The Affluent Society is a modem classic because it helped define a new moment in the human condition. For most of history," hunger, sickness, and cold" threatened nearly everyone, Galbraith wrote. "Poverty was found everywhere in that world. Obviously it is not of ours. "After World War Il, the dread of another Great Depression gave way to an economic boom. In the 1930s unemployment had averaged 18. 2 percent; in the 1950s it was 4. 5 percent. To Galbraith, materialism had gone mad and would breed discontent. Through advertising, companies conditioned consumers to buy things they didn't really want or need. Because so much spending was artificial, it would be unfulfilling. Meanwhile, government spending that would make everyone better off was being cut down because people instinctively-and wrongly-labeled government only as "a necessary evil". It's often said that only the rich are getting ahead; everyone else is standing still or falling behind. Well, there are many undeserving rich--overpaid chief executives, for instance. But over any meaningful period, most people's incomes are increasing. From 1995 to 2004, inflation-adjusted average family income rose 14. 3 percent, to $ 43,200. People feel, "squeezed" because their rising incomes often don't satisfy their rising wants--for bigger homes, more health care, more education, faster Internet connections. The other great frustration is that it has not eliminated insecurity. People regard job stability as part of their standard of living. As corporate layoffs increased, that part has eroded. More workers fear they've be- come "the disposable American" ,as Louis Uchitelle puts it in his book by the same name. Because so much previous suffering and social-conflict stemmed from poverty ,the arrival of widespread affluence suggested utopian(乌托邦式的)possibilities. Up to a point, affluence succeeds. There is much less physical misery than before. People are better off. Unfortunately, affluence also creates new complaints and contradictions. Advanced societies need economic growth to satisfy the multiplying wants of their citizens. But the quest for growth lets loose new anxieties and economic conflicts that disturb the social order. Affluence liberates the individual ,promising that everyone can choose a unique way to self-fulfillment. But the promise is so extravagant that it predestines many disappointments and sometimes inspires choices that have anti-social consequences, including family breakdown and obesity (肥胖症). Statistical indicators of happiness have not risen with incomes. Should we be surprised? Not really. We've simply reaffirmed an old truth: the pursuit of affluence does not always end with happiness.

单选题The close relationship between poetry and music scarcely needs to be argued. Both are aural modes which employ rhythm, rime, and pitch as major devices; to these the one adds linguistic meaning, connotation, and various traditional figures, and the other can add, at least in theory, all of these plus harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration techniques. In English the two are closely bound historically. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry seems certainly to have been read or chanted to a harpist"s accompaniment; the verb used in Beowulf for such a performance, the Finn episode, is singan, to sing, and the noun gyd, song. A major source of the lyric tradition in English poetry is the songs of the troubadours. The distance between the gyd in Beowulf and the songs of Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan may seem great, but is one of time rather than aesthetics. The lyric poem as a literary work and the lyrics of a popular song are both still essentially the same thing: poetry. Whether the title of the work be "Gerontion", or "Hound Dog", our criteria for evaluating the work must remain the same. The most important prerequisite for both a significant poem and significant lyrics in a popular song is that the writer be faithful to his own personal vision or to the vision of the poem he is writing. Skill and craft for writing poetry are indeed necessary because these are the only means by which a poet can preserve the integrity of this vision in the poem. A poet must not, either because of lack of skill or because of worship of popularity, wealth, or critical acclaim, go outside of his own or his own poem"s vision—on pain of writing only the derivative or the trivial. Historically, the writers and singers of the lyrics of popular songs have seemed often to be incapable of personal vision, and to have confused both originality and morality with a servile compliance to popular taste.