单选题The European Union revealed on January 23rd how it plans to save the world. A mammoth climate-change plan spells out in detail how much pain each of its 27 members will have to beat if the EU is to meet ambitious targets set by national leaders last March. The aim is to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 by at least a fifth, and more than double to 20% the amount of energy produced from renewable sources such as wind or wave power. If fuel from plants proves green enough, 10% of the fuel used in transport must come from biofuels by the same date. The new plan turns these goals into national targets. This will surely start much grumbling and months of horse-trading, as the European Commission's recommendations are turned into binding law by national governments and the European Parliament. Countries with greenery in their veins are being asked to take more of the burden than newer members. Sweden, for example, is being invited to meet 49% of its energy from renewables. At the other end, Malta gets a renewables target of just 10%. It is a similar story when it comes to cutting greenhouse gases; by 2020, Denmark must cut emissions by 20% from 2005 levels; Bulgaria and Romania, the newest members, may let their emissions rise by 20%. EU leadership on climate change will not come cheap. The direct costs alone may be C 60 billion ($87 billion), or about 0.5% of total EU GDP, by 2020, said the commission's president, Jose Manuel Barroso. But this is still presented as a bargain compared with the cost of inaction, which Mr. Barroso put at ten times as high. "Oh, leading the world in the fight against climate change need not cost jobs. Even in the most heavily polluting branches of heavy industry. We want to keep out industry in Europe," insisted Mr. Barroso. The trick to achieve the seemingly impossible targets is the EU's emissions-trading scheme (ETS). This obliges big polluters such as power companies or manufacturing giants to trade permits that allow them to emit CO2 and other climate-change nasties, within a steadily tightening overall cap. If countries such as the US do not sign binding international agreements by 2001, then the heaviest greenhouse-gas emitters inside the EU may be given these allowances free, the commission suggests. Or, it threatens, firms to buy ETS permits.

单选题In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their two year old was told that since the child had made no real economic contribution to the family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast, less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three year old sued in New York for accidental-death damages and won an award of $ 750, 000. The transformation in social values implicit in just a posing these two incidents is the subject of Viviana Zelizer's excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child. During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept of the "useful" child who contributed to the family economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion of the "useless" child who, though producing no income for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet considered emotionally "priceless". Well established among segments of the middle and upper classes by the mid-1800's, this new view of childhood spread through-out society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations and compulsory education laws predicated in part on the assumption that a child's emotional value made child labor taboo. For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were many and complex. The gradual erosion of children's productive value in a maturing industrial economy, the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development of the companionate family(a family in which members were united by explicit bonds of love rather than duty)were all factors critical in changing the assessment of children's worth. Yet "expulsion of children from the ' cash nexus' , ... although clearly shaped by profound changes in the economic, occupational, and family structures," Zelizer maintains. "Was also part of a cultural process 'of sacralization' of children's lives. " Protecting children from the crass business world became enormously important for late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentless corruption of human values by the marketplace. In stressing the cultural determinants of a child's worth. Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new " sociological economics" , who have analyzed such traditionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, education, and health solely in terms of their economic determinants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces in the form of individual "preferences" , these sociologists tend to view all human behavior as directed primarily by the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to transform price. As children became more valuable in emotional terms, she argues, their " exchange" or "surrender" value on the market, that is, the conversion of their intangible worth into cash terms, became much greater.

单选题______ touching in Henry's stories is the gallantry with which ordinary people straggle to maintain their dignity.

单选题The poor quality of sound of the film mined the ______ perfect product.

单选题The bed has been______in the family. It was my great grandmother's originally.

单选题 Unless we spend money to spot and prevent asteroids (小行星)now, one might crash into Earth and destroy life as we know it, say some scientists. Asteroids are bigger versions of the meteoroids (流星)that race across the night sky. Most orbit the sun far from Earth and don't threaten us. But there are also thousands whose orbits put them on a collision course with Earth. Buy $ 40 million worth of new telescopes right now. Then spend $ 10 million a year for the next 25 years to locate most of the space rocks. By the time we spot a fatal one, the scientists say, we'll have a way to change its course. Some scientists favor pushing asteroids off course with nuclear weapons. But the cost wouldn't be cheap. Is it worth it? Two things experts consider when judging any risk are : 1) How likely the event is ; and 2) How bad the consequences if the event occurs. Experts think an asteroid big enough to destroy lots of life might strike Earth once every 400, 000 years. Sounds pretty rare-but if one did fall, it would be the end of the world. "If we don't take care of these big asteroids, they'll take care of us," says one scientist. "It's that simple. " The cure, though, might be worse than the disease. Do we really want fleets of nuclear weapons sitting around on Earth? "The world has less to fear from doomsday (毁灭性的) rocks than from a great nuclear fleet set against them," said a New York Times article.

单选题If everybody takes an active part and says what he thinks, the discussion will surely be ______.

单选题 To understand the marketing concept, it is only necessary to understand the difference between marketing and selling. Not too many years ago, most industries concentrated primarily on the efficient production of goods, and then relied on ~'persuasive salesmanship" to move as much of these goods as possible. Such production and selling focuses on the needs of the seller to produce goods and then convert them into money. Marketing, on the other hand, focuses on the wants of consumers. It begins with first analyzing the preferences and demands of consumers and then producing goods that will satisfy them. This eye-on-the-consumer approach is known as the marketing concept, which simply means that instead of trying to sell whatever is easiest to produce or buy for resale, the makers and dealers first try to fred out what the consumer wants to buy and then go about making it according to consumer demand. This concept does not imply that consumer satisfaction is given priority over profit in a company. There are always two sides to every business activity--the fkrrn and the customer. Each must be satisfied before trade occurs. Successful merchants and producer and each must be satisfied before trade occurs. Successful merchants and producers, however, recognize that the surest route to profit is through understanding customers. This concept has been recognized in such slogans as "Have It Your Way" and "You're the Boss". A good example of the importance of satisfying the consumer presented itself in mid 1985, when Coca Cola changed the flavor of its drink. The non-acceptance of the new flavor by a significant portion of the public brought about a prompt restoration of the Classic Coke, which was then marketed alongside the new. King customer ruled !

单选题All of the dental instruments need to be ______ before the next patient is seen.

单选题They need to move to new and large apartments. Do you know of any______ones in this area?

单选题In most earthquakes the Earth's crust cracks like porcelain. Stress builds up until a fracture forms at the depth of a few kilometers and the crust slips to relieve the stress. Some earthquakes, however, take place hundreds of kilometers down in the Earth's mantle, where high pressure makes rock so ductile that it flows instead of cracking, even under stress severe enough to deform it like putty. How can there be earthquakes at such depths? ' That such deep events do occur has been accepted only since 1927, when the seismologist Kiyoo Wadati convincingly demonstrated their existence. Instead of comparing the arrival times of seismic waves at different locations, as earlier researchers had done, Wadati relied on a time difference between the arrival of primary (P)waves and the slower secondary (S) waves. Because P and S waves travel at different but fairly constant speeds;the interval between their arrivals increases in proportion to the distance from the earthquake focus, or a rupture point For most earthquakes, Wadati discovered, the interval was quite short near the epicenter, the point on the surface where shaking is the strongest For a few events, however, the delay was long enough at the epicenter. Wadati saw a similar pattern when he analyzed data on the intensity of shaking. Most earthquakes had a small area of intense shaking, which weakened rapidly with increasing distance from the epicenter, but others were characterized by a lower peak intensity, felt over a broader area. Both the P-S intervals and the intensity patterns suggested two kinds of earthquakes: the more common shallow events, in which the focus lay just under the epicenter, and the deep events, with a focus several hundred kilometers down. The question remained;how can such quakes occur, given that mantle rock at a depth of more than 50 kilometers is too flexible to store enough stress to fracture? Wadati's work suggested that deep events occur in areas(now called Wadati-Benioff zones) where one crustal plate is forced under another and descends into the mantle. The descending rock is substantially cooler than the surrounding mantle and hence is less ductile and much more liable to fracture.

单选题The new government has just set up a {{U}}monopoly{{/U}} in salt.

单选题When a disease of epidemic proportions rips into the populace, scientists immediately get to work, trying to locate the source of the affliction and find ways to combat it. Oftentimes, success is achieved, as medical science is able to isolate the parasite, germ or cell that causes the problem and finds ways to effectively kill or contain it. In the most serious of cases, in which the entire population of a region or country may be at grave risk, it is deemed necessary to protect the entire population through vaccination, so as to safeguard lives and ensure that the disease will not spread. The process of vaccination allows the patient"s body to develop immunity to the virus or disease so that, if it is encountered, one can fight it off naturally. To accomplish this, a small weak or dead strain of the disease is actually injected into the patient in a controlled environment, so that his body"s immune system can learn to fight the invader properly. Information on how to penetrate the disease"s defenses is transmitted to all elements of the patient"s immune system in a process that occurs naturally, in which genetic information is passed from cell to cell. This makes sure that, should the patient later come into contact with the real problem, his body is well equipped and trained to deal with it, having already done so before. There are dangers inherent in the process, however. On occasion, even the weakened version of the disease contained in the vaccine proves too much for the body to handle, resulting in the immune system succumbing, and, therefore, the patient"s death. Such is the case of the smallpox vaccine, designed to eradicate the smallpox epidemic that nearly wiped out the entire Native American population and killed massive numbers of settlers. Approximately 1 in 10,000 people who receives the vaccine contract the smallpox disease from the vaccine itself and dies from it. Thus, if the entire population of the United States were to receive the Smallpox Vaccine today, 3000 Americans would be left dead. Fortunately, the smallpox virus was considered eradicated in the early 1970"s, ending the mandatory vaccination of all babies in America. In the event of a re-introduction of the disease, however, mandatory vaccinations may resume, resulting in more unexpected deaths from vaccination. The process, which is truly a blessing, may indeed hide some hidden cures.

单选题Several loudspeakers are______from the ceiling and we can hear the speaker very clearly.

单选题Alone in London, without friends, work or money, Shelley fell into______.

单选题The Japanese personnel manager had to______keeping a chemist on the payroll even though the company no longer needed his expertise.

单选题Most people don't think of a stamp as a receipt, but that is ______ it really is a proof of just how much money you have paid in advance for mail delivery. A. what B. why C. how D. who

单选题In the dark they could not see anything clear, but could ______.