单选题Having a few too many drinks can mean more than just a blackout or a bad hangover. People who engage in binge drinking are courting danger, experts warn. Binge drinking is most common at colleges and universities, where many adults treat drinking to excess as a rite of passage. A 1997 study from the Harvard School of Public Health reports that 42.7% of all college students engage in binge drinking. The well-publicized deaths of several college students from binge drinking in 1997 highlights the risks. An 18-year-old freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology drank himself into a coma and died. A 20-year-old fraternity pledge at Louisiana State University died from alcohol poisoning. "Alcohol is always toxic. It's really a poison," said Steven Schandler, professor of psychology at Chapman University and chief of addiction research at the Long Beach Veterans Affairs Health Care System, who added that binge drinking can lead to alcohol poisoning. "Because it's a poison, like any other poison, if you take in a little bit, you might tolerate it, but if you take in a lot, you might die." Administrators and doctors say that college freshmen are especially at risk for alcohol poisoning, in part because they often lack the maturity to refrain or stop. And for some who may be new to drinking, their bodies have a relatively low tolerance for alcohol. But problems with alcohol aren't limited to teenagers and young adults. A 39-year-old Buena Park man recently recalled that two days of steady imbibing on a trip to Las Vegas several years ago left him in bad shape. Doctors say blood alcohol levels of about 4%—five times the legal intoxication limit of 0.8%—can induce potentially lethal side effects in most people. Alcoholics have higher limits. Although not well understood, enzymes that break down and expel alcohol in the liver and kidneys do so more effectively in seasoned drinkers, allowing them to tolerate more, Schandler said. Regardless of a person's tolerance, alcohol exerts its influence when the amount of alcohol taken in exceeds the amount that the body can digest. At that point, alcohol passes from the bloodstream into the brain and begins its attack. Alcohol first affects the brain's cortex, which controls more sophisticated thought processes. That's why people generally become less inhibited under the influence of alcohol, and some are more willing to try things that could be dangerous to themselves or others. Coordination, mainly controlled by the cerebellum, is the next to go, leading to slurred speech and difficulty walking in a straight line. As excessive drinking continues, alcohol moves deeper into the brain until "it gets to the very basic structure of the brain stem that affects things like respiration and heart beat," said Dr. Bret Ginther, an assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at UC Irvine. At that point, people may pass out or fail into a coma. Their vital signs may weaken. "The most common cause of death from alcohol poisoning is respiratory arrest," said Ginther. Eventually, the heart simply stops. Getting to that point is fairly unusual. But Ginther said that at least once or twice a month, patients are brought into the emergency room at UCI Medical Center in Orange suffering from alcohol poisoning. College officials say they are always on the lookout for alcohol abuse but say there is no fail-safe method to keep students from drinking. Many colleges try to educate students, especially those caught drinking illegally or causing disruptions. The Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention in Newton, Mass, advocates a communitybased approach that includes administrators, faculty, police and businesses in the fight to curb binge drinking, in part by being on alert for people abusing alcohol. The center also stresses the importance of parental guidance and urges parents to have frank discussions with their children about excessive drinking.

单选题The manager was angry because somebody ______.

单选题Her eyes were shining brightly and her face was suffuse ______ color.

单选题{{B}}Passage Five{{/B}} Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period before the South began to become self-consciously and distinctively "Southern" --the decades after 1815. Consequently, the cultural history of Britain's North American empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been writ ten almost as if the Southern colonies had never existed. The American culture that emerged during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras has been depicted as having been simply an extension of New England Puritan culture. However, Professor Davis has recently argued that the South stood apart from the rest of American society during this early period, following its own unique pattern of cultural development. The case for Southern distinctiveness rests upon two related premises: first, that the cultural similarities among the five Southern colonies were far more impressive than the differences, and second, that what made those colonies alike also made them different from the other colonies. The first, for which Davis offers an enormous amount of evidence, can be accepted without major reservations; the second is far more problematic. What makes the second premise problematic is the use of the Puritan colonies as a basis for comparison. Quite properly, Davis decries the excessive influence ascribed by historians to the Puritans in the formation of American culture. Yet Davis inadvertently adds weight to such ascriptions by using the Puritans as the standard against which to assess the achievements and contributions of Southern colonials. Throughout, Davis focuses on the important, and undeniable, differences between the Southern and Puritan colonies in motives for and patterns of early settlement, in attitudes toward nature and Native Americans, and in the degree of receptivity to metropolitan cultural influences. However, recent scholarship has strongly suggested that those aspects of early New England culture that seem to have been most distinctly Puritan, such as the strong religious orientation and the communal impulse, were not even typical of New England as a whole, but were largely confined to the two colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Thus, what in contrast to the Puritan colonies appears to Davis to be peculiarly Southern--aquisitiveness, a strong interest in politics and the law, and a tendency to cultivate metropolitan cultural models--was not only more typically English than the cultural patterns exhibited by Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also almost certainly characteristic of most other early modern British colonies from Barbados north to Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Within the larger framework of American colonial life, then, not the Southern but the Puritan colonies appear to have been distinctive, and even they seem to have been rapidly assimilating to the dominant cultural patterns by the late Colonial period.

单选题The government is trying to ______ better understanding between the two countries.

单选题The word "it" in paragraph 3 refers to ______.

单选题"Between you and me, he said you are a good for nothing." "______"

单选题He ______ us as consistently fair and accurate about the issues we are concerned about.

单选题Why does the author ask the reader to forget what Virginia Woolf said about the necessities of a writer?

单选题In an effort to __________ culture shocks, I think there is value in knowing something about the nature of culture.

单选题Mary finally decided ______ all the junk she had kept in the garage.

单选题There was snow everywhere, so that the shape of things was difficult to ______. (2010年四川大学考博试题)

单选题The doctor took X-rays to ______ the chance of broken bones.

单选题The boy students in this school are nearly ______ as the girl students to say they intend to get a college degree in business.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} There are 5 reading passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice and mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding letter in the brackets.{{B}}Passage 1{{/B}} While the polltakers are most widely known for their political surveys, the greatest part of their work is on behalf of American business. There are three kinds of commercial surveys. One is a public relations research, such as that done for banks, which finds out how the public feels about a company. Another is employee-attitude research, which learns from rank-and-file workers how they really feel about their jobs and their bosses, and which can avert strikes by getting to the bottom of grievances quickly. The third, and probably most spectacular, is marketing research, testing public receptivity to products and designs. The investment a company must make for a new product is enormous--$ 5,000,000 to $10,000,000, for instance, for just one new product. Through the surveys a company can discover in advance what objections the public has to competing products, and whether it really wants a new one. These surveys are actually a new set of signals permitting better communication between business and the general public--letting them talk to each other. Such communication is vital in a complex society like our own. Without it, we would have not only tremendous waste but the industrial anarchy of countless new unwanted products appearing and disappearing.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} Doctors at Stanford University are studying a medication they hope will alleviate the suffering of millions of American women. But their target isn't breast cancer, osteoporosis, or a similarly well-known affliction. Despite its alarming impact on its victims, the malady in question has received comparatively little medical scrutiny. It's a "hidden epidemic," according to the Stanford researchers: compulsive shopping disorder. That's right. What was once merely a punchline in television sitcoms is now being taken seriously by many clinicians. According to the Stanford study's leader, Dr. Lorrin Koran, compulsive shopping is "motivated by 'irresistible' impulses, characterized by spending that is excessive and inappropriate, has harmful consequences for the individual, and tends to be chronic and stereotyped." Compulsive shoppers "binge buy" --most often clothes, shoes, makeup, and jewelry--and then suffer intense guilt. That, in turn, helps trigger another frenzied trip to the mall, and the cycle continues. Could compulsive shopping be a health hazard associated with America's unparalleled economic prosperity? "It seems to be a disease of affluence," says Dr. Jerrold Pollak, a clinical psychologist who's treated several shopaholics. "Advertisers... would like us to think that shopping is a reason to live," agrees Dr. Cheryl Carmin, another clinical psychologist. "If you do not have the time or inclination to go to the mall or grocery store, there are catalogs, delivery services, home shopping networks on TV, and endless items to buy via the Internet." Indeed, this year, US advertisers will spend $ 233 billion--an amount equal to six federal education budgets to persuade Americans to buy, buy, buy. Yet the possibility that US advertisers may be driving certain women in our society t9 psychosis is only part of the story. It seems that the pharmaceutical companies' quest to cure the effects of excessive marketing may itself be little more than a cleverly-disguised marketing scheme. The Stanford study, like many of its kind, is being funded by a pharmaceutical company. The undisclosed drug is an FDA-approved antidepressant, specifically an SSRI--a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. (The researchers are also studying behavioral therapies for compulsive shoppers.) The researchers running the Stanford study refused to reveal their sponsor. However, only five SSRIs are currently on the US market. Pfizer (makers of Zolofi), Eli Billy (Prozac) and SmithKline Beecham (Paxil) all reported that they are neither conducting nor planning any studies of their drugs for compulsive shopping. Solvay (Luvox)also seems an unlikely candidate. In 1997, researchers at the University of Iowa tried using Luvox to treat compulsive shoppers and found no measurable differences between the effects of the drug and those of a placebo. Perhaps the manufacturers of Luvox want to give their product another shot. More likely, however, the mysterious benefactor of the Stanford Study is Forest Pharmaceuticals (Celexa). Their PR department neither confirmed nor denied any involvement in Koran's study. Why would a pharmaceutical company anonymously spend money to license one of its top-selling drugs for a marginal disorder like compulsive shopping? A big part of the answer is profit. The mystery company presumably hopes to carve a unique slice out of the mental disorder pie in order to market it together with a ready-made treatment. This is not at all a new strategy for the world's mammoth pharmaceutical firms, as David Healy, a professor at the University of Wales College of Medicine, explains in his book "The Anti- Depressant Em." Healy's book describes a process by which companies Seek to "educate" both patients and clinicians about a new disorder, to sell the disorder in preparation for selling its cure. Funding clinical trials is a crucial part of that process.

单选题What accounts for the great outburst of major inventions in early America-breakthroughs such as the telegraph, the steamboat and the weaving machine? Among the many shaping factors, I would single out the country"s excellent elementary schools; a labor force that welcomed the new technology; the practice of giving premiums to inventors; and above all the American genius for nonverbal, "spatial" thinking about things technological. Why mention the elementary schools? Because thanks to these schools our early mechanics, especially in the New England and Middle Atlantic states, were generally literate and at home in arithmetic and in some aspects of geometry and trigonometry. Acute foreign observers related American adaptiveness and inventiveness to this educational advantage. As a member of a British commission visiting here in 1853 reported, "With a mind prepared by thorough school discipline, the American boy develops rapidly into the skilled workman." A further stimulus to invention came from the "premium" system, which preceded our patent system and for years ran parallel with it. This approach, originated abroad, offered inventors medals, cash prizes and other incentives. In the United States, multitudes of premiums for new devices were awarded at country fairs and at the industrial fairs in major cities. Americans flocked to these fairs to admire the new machines and thus to renew their faith in the beneficence of technological advance. Given this optimistic approach to technological innovation, the American worker took readily to that special kind of nonverbal thinking required in mechanical technology. As Eugene Ferguson has pointed out, "A technologist thinks about objects that cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in his mind by a visual, nonverbal process... The designer and the inventor...are able to assemble and manipulate in their minds devices that as yet do not exist." This nonverbal "spatial" thinking can be just as creative as painting and writing. Robert Fulton once wrote, "The mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc., like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as an exhibition of his thoughts, in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea." When all these shaping forces—schools, open attitudes, the premium system, a genius for spatial thinking—interacted with one another on the rich U.S. mainland, they produced that American characteristic, emulation. Today that word implies mere imitation. But in earlier times it meant a friendly but competitive striving for fame and excellence.

单选题It's never easy for a mighty military to tread lightly on foreign soil. In the case of American forces in South Korea, protectors of the nation's sovereignty since the Korean War, the job is made doubly difficult by local sensitivities arising from a history of foreign domination. So when a few GIs commit particularly brutal crimes against the local populace, it's easy for some South Koreans to ask: Who will guard us from our guardians? That kind of questioning grew more insistent on January 20, when police found the body of a 30year-old Korean woman, Kang Un-gyong, in the apartment she shared with her American. boyfriend. An autopsy showed Kang, who had bruises over most of her face and chest, died after being hit on the back of her head with a blunt object. Her boyfriend, Henry Kevin McKinley, 36, an electrician at the United States military base in Seoul, admitted heating her. McKinley said he pushed Kang, who then struck her head on a radiator, but denied that he tried to murder her. On January 21 McKinley was arrested on charges similar to involuntary manslaughter under Korean law. As a civilian employee of the U.S. military in Korea, he comes under the purview of the Status-of-Forces agreement between Washington and Seoul. This grants the South Korean government criminal jurisdiction——but not pre-trial custody——over members of American forces in Korea. Because of the gravity of the charges against McKinley, however, the Americans waived their rights to keep him in their custody before trial. The Kang case was only the latest in a series of crimes involving members of U.S. forces and Koreans. Just a few days earlier, a U.S. army sergeant was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting a local in a subway brawl last May——even though some reports said it was a Korean who instigated tile fray. The murder also followed two separate incidents in which American soldiers were indicted on charges of attempted rape. With the spotlight already on the behaviour of American servicemen abroad because of the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Okinawa, allegedly by a group of U.S. soldiers, the Kang murder burst the lid on many Koreans' resentment of the presence of 37,000 American troops in their midst. Official relations between Seoul and Washington remain on an even keel, and most Koreans don't blame the entire U.S. military for the crimes of individual servicemen. But the incidents have played into the hands of those who are questioning the very basis of the American presence in South Korea. Some observers believe the weds of Koreans' estrangement from the U.S. military were first sown in 1980, when troops under the control of former President Chun Doo Hwan massacred some 200 pro-democracy protesters in the southern city of Kwangju. Many left-wing students——usually at the forefront of anti-government protests——still insist that the U.S. military command acquiesced in the crackdown. But public alienation against U.S. troops really took off after the brutal 1992 murder of a Korean prostitute by an American soldier. Pictures taken at the time-not released publicly but seen by the REVIEW-showed the dead woman's mouth stuffed with matches and a bottle stuck in her vagina. The man convicted of the murder, Pvt. Kenneth Markle of the U. S. army's 2nd Division, received a life sentence, later reduced to 15 years. Cultural misunderstandings haven't helped matters any. Many Koreans believe all Gls are mist young men with little education from rural areas of the U.S. "I've been hit and called names by Koreans, but I didn't respond," says a soldier at Camp Humphreys in Pyongtaek. He says the U.S. forces' command "drills it into your head every day: don't fight with a Korean. You can't win." Other factors are also at play, not least the swelling self-confidence of the younger generation of South Koreans, bolstered by their nation's growing economic and political clout. "Once upon a time we needed help from the U.S., and American economic and military aid was very important to Korea," says Nam Chan Soon, a journalist at the Dong A llbo newspaper, "But now times have changed." While the U.S. command recognizes the need to respect Korean sensitivities, its hard for the Americans to keep a low profile. One reason: The main U.S. military base in Korea is in the Itae-won district——in the very heart of Seoul. Plans to move the base to another location have been put off because of budget constraints.

单选题You're ______ your time trying to persuade him; he' II never help you.