单选题Carmen Arace Middle School is situated in the pastoral town of Bloomfield, Conn. , but four years ago it faced many of the same challenges as inner-city schools in nearby Hartford: low scores on standardized tests, dropping enrollment and high rates of detention. Then the school's hard-driving principal, Delores Bolton, persuaded her board to shake up the place by buying a laptop computer for each student and teacher to use, in school and at home. For good measure, the board provided wireless Internet access at school. Total cost: $2. 5 million. Now, an hour before classes start, every seat in the library is taken by students eager to get online. Fifth-grade teacher Jen Friday talks about sedimentary rocks as students view them at a colorful website. After school, students on buses pull laptops from backpacks to get started on homework. Since the computers arrived, enrollment is up 20%. Disciplinary suspensions are down 80%. Scores on state achievement tests are up 35%. Bolton, who is black, is proud to run "a school with 90% black enrollment that is on the cutting edge. " Indeed, school systems in rural Maine and New York City are eager to follow Arace Middle School's example. Governor Angus King has proposed using $50 million from an unexpected budget surplus to buy a laptop for all of Maine's 17, 000 seventh-graders — and for new seventh-graders each fall. The funds would create a permanent endowment whose interest would help buy the computers. The plan, scaled back to $ 30 million in a compromise with the legislature, is scheduled to be voted on this week. In the same spirit, the New York City board of education voted unanimously on April 12 to create a school Internet portal, which would make money by selling ads and licensing e-commerce sites. The portal will also provide e-mail service for the city's 1.1 million public school students. Profits will be used to buy laptops for each of the school system's 87, 000 fourth-graders. Within nine years, all students in grades 4 and higher will have their own computers. Back in Bloomfield, the school board is seeking federal grant money to expand its laptop program to high school students. In the meantime, most of the kinks have been worked out. Some students were using their computers to goof off or visit unauthorized websites. But teachers have the ability to track where students have been on the Web and to restrict them. "That is the worst when they disable you," says eighth-grade honors student Jamie Bassell. "You go through laptop withdrawal. " The habit is rubbing off on parents. "I taught my mom to use e-mail," says another eighth-grader, Katherine Hypolite. "And now she's taking computer classes. I'm so proud of her!"

单选题 There are exceptions to the rule of male insects being smaller than the females, and some of these exceptions are intelligible. Size and strength would be an advantage to the males which fight for the possession of the females, and in these cases, as with the stag-beetle (Lucanus), the males are larger than the females. There are, however, other beetles which are not known to fight together, of which the males exceed the females in size, and the meaning of this fact is not known, but in some of these cases, as with the huge Dynastes and Megasoma, we can at least see that there would be no necessity for the males to be smaller than the females, in order to be matured before them, for these beetles are not short-lived, and there would be ample time for the pairing of the sexes.

单选题{{B}}Passage One{{/B}} As one works with color in a practical or experimental way, one is impressed by two apparently unrelated facts. Color as seen is a mobile changeable thing depending to a large extent on the relationship of the color to other colores seen simultaneously. It is not fixed in its relation to the direct stimulus which creates it. On the other hand, the properties of surfaces that give rise to color do not seem to change greatly under a wide variety of illumination colors, usually (but not always) looking much the same in artificial light as in daylight. Both of these effects seem to the due in large part to the mechanism of color adaptation mentioned earlier. When the eye is fixed on a colored area, there is an immediate readjustment of the sensitivity of the eye to color in and around the area viewed. This readjustment does not immediately affect the color seen but usually does affect the next area to which the gaze is shifted. The longer the time of viewing, the higher the intensity, and the larger the area, the greater the effect will be in terms of its persistence in the succeeding viewing situation. As indicated by the work of Wright and Schouten, it appears that, at least for a first approximation, full adaptation takes place over a very brief time if the adapting source is moderately bright and the eye has been in relative darkness just previously. As the stimulus is allowed to act, however, the effect, becomes more persistent in the sense that it takes the eye longer to regain its sensitivity to lower intensities. The net result is that, if the eye is so exposed and then the gaze is transferred to an area of lower intensity, the loss of sensitivity produced by the first area will still be present and appear as an "afterimage" super imposed on the second. The effect not only is present over the actual area causing the "local adaptation" but also spreads with decreasing strength to adjoining areas of the eye to produce "lateral adaptation". Also, because of the persistence of the effect if the eye is shifted around from one object to another, all of which are at similar brightnesses or have similar colors, the adaptation will tend to become uniform over the whole eye.

单选题The ceremony will ______ as soon as the president arrives.

单选题From the passage we can infer that a US counterpart of Vanables or Thompson would ______.

单选题 American suffers from an overdose of work{{U}} (51) {{/U}}who they are or what they do. They spend{{U}} (52) {{/U}}time at work than at any time since World War Ⅱ. In 1950, the US had fewer working hours than any other{{U}} (53) {{/U}}country. Today, it{{U}} (54) {{/U}}every country but Japan, where industrial employees log 2, 155 hours a year compared{{U}} (55) {{/U}}1, 951 in the US and 1, 603{{U}} (56) {{/U}}West employees. Between 1969 mad 1989, employed Americans{{U}} (57) {{/U}}an average of 138 hours to their yearly work schedules. The work-week{{U}} (58) {{/U}}at about 40 hours, but people are working more weeks each year.{{U}} (59) {{/U}}, paid time off-holidays, vacations, sick leave--{{U}} (60) {{/U}}15 percent in the 1990s. As corporations have{{U}} (61) {{/U}}stiffer competition and slower growth in productivity, they{{U}} (62) {{/U}}employees to work longer. Cost-cutting layoffs in the 1980s{{U}} (63) {{/U}}the professional and managerial ranks, leaving fewer people to get the job done. In lower-paid occupations{{U}} (64) {{/U}}wages have been reduced, workers have added hous{{U}} (65) {{/U}}over-time or extra jobs to{{U}} (66) {{/U}}their living standard. The Government estimates that more than seven million people hold a second job. For the first time, large{{U}} (67) {{/U}}of people say they want to cut{{U}} (68) {{/U}}on working hours, even if it means earning less money. But most employers are{{U}} (69) {{/U}}to let them do so. The government, which has stepped back from its traditional{{U}} (70) {{/U}}as a regulator of work time, should take steps to make shorter hours possible.

单选题Malaysian Airlines lost an airplane on March 8 last year, ______whereabouts still remains a mystery.

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. A. maximize B. thrive C. measures D. remain

单选题Most of the flights have a baggage______of 44lbs per passenger.

单选题Their view that women are the natural ______ of morality is not my view.

单选题One can understand others much better by noting the immediate and fleeting reactions of their eyes and ______ to expressed thoughts.

单选题It was clear that the storm ______ his arrival by two hours. A. retarded B. retrieved C. refrained D. retreated

单选题 Computerized design, advancfed materials and new technologies are being used to produce machines of a type never seen before. It looks as if it came straight from the set of Star Wars. It has four-wheel drive and rises above rocky surfaces. It lowers and raises its nose when going up and down hills. And when it comes to a river, it turns amphibious: two hydrojets power it along by blasting water under its body. There is room for two passengers and a driver, who sit inside a glass bubble operating electronic, aircraft-type controls. A vehicle so daring on land and water needs windscreen wipers--but it doesn't have any. Water molecules are disintegrated on the screen's surface by ultrasonic sensors. This unusual vehicle is the Racoon. It is an invention not of Hollywood but of Renault, a rather conservative French state-owned carmaker, better known for its family hatchbacks. Renault built the Racoon to explore new freedoms for designers and engineers created by advances in materials and manufacturing processes. Renault is thinking about startlingly different cars; other producers have radical new ideas for trains, boats and aeroplanes. The first of the new freedoms is in design. Powerful computer-aided design (CAD) systems can replace with a click of a computer mouse hours of laborious work done on thousands of drawing boards. So new products, no matter how complicated, can be developed much faster. For the first time, Boeing will not have to build a giant replica of its new airliner, the 777, to make sure all the bits fit together. Its CAD sys- tem will take care of that. But Renault is taking CAD further. It claims the Racoon is the world's first vehicle to be designed within the digitized world of virtual reality. Complex programs were used to imitate the vehicle and the land that it was expected to cross. This allowed a team led by Patrick Le Qucment, Renault's industrial-design director, to "drive" it long before a prototype existed. Renault is not alone in thinking that virtual reality will transform automotive de- sign. In Detroit, Ford is also investigating its potential. Jack Telnac, the firm's bead of design, would like designers in different parts of the world to work more closely together, linked by computers. They would do more than style cares. Virtual reality will allow engineers to peer inside the working parts of a vehicle. Designers will watch bearings move, oil flow, gears mesh and hydraulics pump. As these techniques catch on, even stranger vehicles are likely to come along. Transforming these creations from virtual reality to actual reality will also become easier, especially with advances in materials. Firms that once bashed everything out of steel now find that new alloys of composite materials (which can be made from mixtures of plastic, resin, ceramics and metals, reinforced with fibers such as glass of carbon) are changing the rules of manufacturing. At the same time, old materials keep getting better, as their producers try to secure their place in the factory of the future. This competition is increasing the pace of development of all materials. With composites, it is possible to build many different parts into a single component. Fiat, Italy's biggest car maker has worked out that it could reduce the number of components needed in one of its car bodies from 150 to 16 by using a composite shell rather than one made of steel. Aircraft and cars may increasingly be assembled as if they were plastic kits.

单选题Having finished their morning work, the clerks stood up behind their desks, ______ themselves.

单选题The ocean bottom, a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth, is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3 600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space. Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rocks from the ocean floor. The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983, During this time, the vessel logged 600 000 kilometers and took almost 20 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger's core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably lo0k like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth. The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world's past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change information that may be used to predict future climates.

单选题He was ______ to steal the money when he saw it lying on the table. A. dragged B. tempted C. elicited D. attracted