单选题It will be safer to walk the streets because people will not need to carry large amounts of cash; virtually all financial ______ will be conducted by computer. [A] transactions [B] transmissions [C] transitions [D] transformations

单选题Both plants and animals of many sorts show remarkable changes in form, structure, growth habits, and even mode of reproduction in becoming adapted to different climatic environment, types of food supply, or mode of living. This divergence in response to evolution is commonly expressed by altering the form and function of some part or parts of the organism, the original identity of which is clearly discernible. For example, the creeping foot of the snail is seen in related marine preemptors to be modified into a flapping organ useful for swimming, and is changed into prehensile arms that bear sartorial disks in the squids and other cephalopods. The limbs of various mammals are modified according to several different modes of life—for swift running (cursorial) as in the horse and antelope, for swinging to several different modes of life—for swinging in trees (arboreal) as in the monkey, for digging ( fossorial ) as in the moles and gophers, for flying (volant) as in the bats, for swimming (aquatic) as in the seals, whales and dolphins, and for other adaptations. The structures or organs that show main change in connection with this adaptive divergence are commonly identified readily as homologous, in spite of great alterations. Thus, the fingers and wrist bones of a bat and whale, for instance, have virtually nothing in common except that they are definitely equivalent elements of the mammalian limb.

单选题Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behaviour is regarded as "all too human", with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely. But a study by Sarach Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well. The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys. They look cute. They are good-natured, cooperative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of "goods and services" than males. Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr. Brosnan"s and Dr. de Waal"s study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to exchange pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different. In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods (are much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (without an actual monkey to eat it) was enough to induce resentment in a female capuchin. The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a cooperative, group-living species. Such cooperation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems for the common ancestor that the species had 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.

单选题Because of the massive oil spillage in the gulf, both the plant and animal lives in the area are in ______. A.destiny B.amenity C.jeopardy D.tragedy

单选题Despite ongoing negotiations with its unions, United Airlines has told the bankruptcy court that the "likely result" will be a decision to terminate all of its pension plans. That would precipitate the biggest pension default in history, more than twice the size of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation default in 2002. The move is expected to destabilize the already struggling airline industry, prompting other old-line carriers like Delta to eventually follow suit to maintain competitiveness. It would also put additional pressure on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the federal agency that insures traditional pensions in case companies go belly up. It's already facing more than a $9 billion shortfall. A default by United would saddle it with an additional $ 8.4 billion in unfunded obligations. If other airlines follow, the PBGC may have to go to Congress and plead for a bailout that some experts say would be bigger than the Savings and Loan debacle of the 1980s. More broadly, what all this means is that retirement for US workers just isn't what it used to be. Forget the gold watch and reliable pension check after 30 years of service. The impact of globalization and competition from low-wage companies that don't provide benefits has shifted the onus of retirement security from larger firms onto individuals. Twenty years ago, 40 percent of American workers were covered by traditional pensions known as defined-benefit plans. Today that number's dropped to 20 percent. As the Bethlehem Steel and United examples show, even that 20 percent may not be able to count on what they've been promised. Currently, about 75 percent of those corporate plazas are underfunded. "There are numerous threats to retirement in the future," says Brad Belt, executive director of the PBGC. "So it's incumbent on individuals to be well informed, prudent about their investments, and to save accordingly." To get a sense of the impact of the pension crisis on individuals, look at what United employees can expect. Pilots, who by law must retire at 60, could see their retirement income cut by 75 percent. Betty, who asked that her name not be used, has been flying for United for 26 years. She was expecting to retire with ＄140,000 a year. After the recent round of give-backs, that was cut to ＄90,000. But if United defaults as expected, she'd receive only ＄28,000 from the PBGC. If she waits until 65 to start collecting, she could be eligible for as much ＄44,500 a year. Either way, once pilots are forced to leave the cockpit at 60, most will probably look for another job rather than lounge on the golf course. Betty has already started a mediation business on the side. "All of the benefits that I' d been promised during those 26 years have been erased by corporate American greed," she says. "And yet I can see the big picture. I've said for three years that our pensions are history. No matter how many promises, they make us, if the money isn't there, it isn't there." For the pilots union, which negotiated the pension benefits over the years, often giving up wage increases for better retirement packages, the current situation is infuriating. They see pensions as benefits that are earned, like employee paychecks, not a bonus to be given as long as a company can afford it. "It seems immoral that just because they happen to be in a legal situation, they can walk away from those obligations, "says Steve Derebey, spokesman for Air Line Pilots Association." Why this isn't a burning, blazing campaign issue is beyond me./

单选题6 What do the extraordinarily successful companies have in common? To find out, we looked for operations. We know that correlations are not always reliable; nevertheless, in the 27 survivors, our group saw four shared personality traits that could explain their lon gevity (长寿). Conservatism in financing. The companies did not risk their capital gratuitously (无缘 无故地). They understood the meaning of money in an old-fashioned way; they knew the usefulness of spare cash in the kitty. Money in hand allowed them to snap up (抓住) op tions when their competitors could not. They did not have to convince third-party financiers of the attractiveness of opportunities they wanted to pursue. Money in the kitty allowed them to govern their growth and evolution. Sensitivity to the world around them. Whether they had built their fortunes on knowl edge or on natural resources, the living companies in our study were able to adapt them selves to changes in the world around them. As wars, depressions, technologies, and pol itics surged and ebbed (潮起潮落), they always seemed to excel at keeping their feelers out, staying attuned to whatever was going on. For information, they sometimes relied on packets carried over vast distances by portage and ship, yet they managed to react in a timely fashion to whatever news they received. They were good at learning and adapting. Awareness of their identity. No matter how broadly diversified the companies were, their employees all felt like parts of a whole. I.ord Cole, chairman of Unilever in the 1960s, for example, saw the company as a fleet of ships. Each ship was independent, but the whole fleet was greater than the sum of its parts. The feeling of belonging to an organi zation and identifying with its achievements is often dismissed softly, but case histories re peatedly show that a sense of community is essential for long-term survival. Managers in the living companies we studied were chosen mostly from within, and all considered them selves to be stewards of a longstanding enterprise. Their top priority was keeping the insti tution at least as healthy as it had been when they took over. Tolerance of new ideas. The long-lived companies in our study tolerated activities in the margin, experiments and eccentricities that stretched their understanding. They recog nized that new businesses may be entirely unrelated to existing businesses and that the act of starting a business need to be centrally controlled. W. R. Grace, from its very beginning, encouraged autonomous experimentation. The company was founded in 1854 by an Irish immigrant in Peru and traded in guano, a natural fertilizer, before it moved into sugar and tin. Eventually, the company established Pan American Airways. Today it is primarily a chemical company, although it is also the leading provider of kidney dialysis (~i:) serv ices in the United States. By definition, a company that survives for more than a century exists in a world it cannot hope to control. Multinational companies are similar to the long-surviving companies of our study in that way. The world of a multinational is very large and stretches across many cultures. That world is inherently less stable and more difficult to influence than a confined national habitat. Multinationals must be willing to change in order to succeed. These four traits form the essential character of companies that have functioned suc cessfully for hundreds of years. Given this basic personality, what priorities do the manag ers of living companies set for themselves and their employees?

单选题A "scientific" view of language was dominant among philosophers and linguists who affected to develop a scientific analysis of human thought and behavior in the early part of this century. Under the force of this view, it was perhaps inevitable that the art of rhetoric should pass from the status of being regarded as of questionable worth (because although it might be both a source of pleasure and a means to urge people to fight action, it might also be a means to distort truth and a source of misguided action) to the status of being wholly condemned. If people are regarded only as machines guided by logic, as they were by these "scientific" thinkers, rhetoric is likely to be held in low regard ; for the most obvious truth about rhetoric is that it speaks to the whole person. It presents its arguments first to the person as a rational being, because persuasive discourse, if honestly conceived, always has a basis in reasoning. Logical argument is the plot, as it were, of any speech or essay that is respectfully intended to persuade people. Yet it is a characterizing feature of rhetoric that it goes beyond this and appeals to the parts of our nature that are involved in feeling, desiring, acting, and suffering. It recalls relevant instances of the emotional reactions of people to circumstances—real or fictional—that are similar to our own circumstances. Such is the purpose of both historical accounts and fables in persuasive discourse: they indicate literally or symbolically how people may react emotionally, with hope or fear, to particular circumstances. A speech attempting to persuade people can achieve little unless it takes into account the aspect of their being related to such hopes and fears. Rhetoric, then, is addressed to human beings living at particular times and in particular places. From the point of view of rhetoric, we are not merely logical thinking machines, creatures abstracted from time and space. The study of rhetoric should therefore be considered the most humanistic of the humanities, since rhetoric is not directed only to our rational selves. It takes into account what the "scientific" view leaves out. If it is a weakness to harbor feelings, then rhetoric may be thought of as dealing in weakness. But those who reject the idea of rhetoric because they believe it deals in lies and who at the same time hope to move people to action, must either be liars themselves or be very naive; pure logic has never been a motivating force unless it has been subordinated to human purposes, feelings, and desires, and thereby ceased to be pure logic.

单选题What do we learn about deserts from this text?

单选题The organ transplant community has______humans and monkeys for ethical reasons.

单选题The microscope enables scientists to distinguish an incredible number and variety of bacteri

单选题Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance. That instincts, as thus defined, exist on an enormous scale in the animal kingdom needs no proof. They are the functional correlatives of structure. With the presence of a certain organ goes, one may say, almost a native aptitude for its use. "Has the bird a gland for the secretion of oil? She knows instinctively how to press the oil from the gland, and apply it to the feather. Has the rattlesnake the grooved tooth and gland of poison? He knows without instruction how to make both structure and function most effective against his enemies. Has the silk worm the functions of secreting the fluid silk? At the proper time she winds the cocoon such as she has never seen, as thousands before have done; and thus without instruction, pattern, or experience, forms a safe abode for herself in the period of transformation. Has the hawk talons? She knows by instinct how to wield them effectively against the helpless quarry. " (Chadbourne, 1872) A very common way of talking about these admirable definite tendencies to act is by naming abstractly the purpose they subserve, such as self-preservation, or defence, or care for eggs and young—and saying the animal has an instinctive fear of death or love life, or that she has an instinct of self-preservation, or an instinct of maternity and the like. But this represents the animal as obeying abstractions which not once in a million cases is it possible it can have framed. The strict physiological way of interpreting the facts leads to far clearer results. The actions we call instinctive all conform to the general reflex type; they are called forth by determinate sensory stimuli in contact with the animal's body, or at a distance in his environment. The cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before the dog, avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and water, etc. , not because he has any notion either of life or of death, or of self, or of preservation. He has probably attained to no one of those conceptions in such a way as to react definitely upon it. He acts in each case separately, and simply because he cannot help it; being so framed that when that particular running thing called a mouse appears in his field of vision he must pursue; that when that particular baking and obstreperous thing called a dog appears there he must retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by; that he must withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. His nervous system is to a great extent a preorganized bundle of such reactions—they are as fatal as sneezing and as exactly correlated to their special excitants as it is to its own. Although the naturalist may, for his own convenience, class these reactions under general heads, he must not forget that in the animal it is a particular sensation or perception or image which calls them forth. At first this view astounds us by the enormous number of special adjustments it supposes animals to possess readymade in anticipation of the outer things among which they are to dwell. Can mutual dependence be so intricate and go so far? Is each thing born fitted to particular other things, and to them exclusively, as locks are fitted to their keys? Undoubtedly this must be believed bo be so. Each nook and cranny of creation, down to our very skin and entrails, has its living inhabitants, with organs suited to the place, to devour and digest the food it harbors and to meet the dangers it conceals; and the minuteness of adaptation thus shown in the way of. structure knows no bounds. Even so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adaptation in the way of conduct which the several inhabitants display.

单选题Doctor Smith was one of the______ in cancer research.

单选题By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a permanent change in the habits of behavior, of thought and of attitude. It is in being thus susceptible to the environment that man differs from the animals, and the higher animals from the lower. The lower animals are influenced by the environment but not in the direction of changing their habits. Their instinctive responses are few and fixed by heredity. When transferred to an unnatural situation, such an animal is led astray by its instincts. Thus the "ant-lion" whose instinct implies it to bore into loose sand by pushing backwards with abdomen, goes backwards on a plate of glass as soon as danger threatens，and endeavors, with the utmost exertions to bore into it. It knows no other mode of flight, "or if such a lonely animal is engaged upon a chain of actions and is interrupted, it either goes on vainly with the remaining actions (as useless as cultivating an unsown field) or dies in helpless inactivity". Thus a net-making spider which digs a burrow and rims it with a bastion of gravel and bits of wood, when removed from a half finished home, will not begin again, though it will continue another burrow, even one made with a pencil. Advance in the scale of evolution along such lines as these could only be made by the emergence of creatures with more and more complicated instincts. Such beings we know in the ants and spiders. But another line of advance was destined to open out a much more far-reaching possibility of which we do not see the end perhaps even in man. Habits, instead of being born ready-made (when they are called instincts and not habits at all), were left more and more to the formative influence of the environment, of which the most important factor was the parent who now cared for the young animal during a period of infancy in which vaguer instincts than those of the insects were molded to suit surroundings which might be considerably changed without harm. This means, one might at first imagine, that gradually heredity becomes less and environment more important. But this is hardly the truth and certainly not the whole truth. For although fixed automatic responses like those of the insect-like creatures are no longer inherited, although selection for purification of that sort is no longer going on, yet selection for educability is very definitely still of importance. The ability to acquire habits can be conceivably inherited just as much as can definite responses to narrow situations. Besides, since a mechanism—is now, for the first time, created by which the individual (in contradiction to the species) can be fitted to the environment, the latter becomes, in another sense, less not more important. And finally, less not the higher animals who possess the power of changing their environment by engineering feats and the like, a power possessed to some extent even by the beaver, and preeminently by man. Environment and heredity are in no case exclusive but always-supplementary factors.

单选题He gives ______ to his anger by kicking chairs.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} There are 5 passages in this section. 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 then blacken the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet.{{B}}Passage One{{/B}} When, in the age of automation, man searches for a worker to do the tedious, unpleasant jobs that are impossible to mechanize, he may very profitably consider the ape. If we tackled the problem of breeding for brains with as much as enthusiasm as we devote to breeding dogs of surrealistic shapes, we could eventually produce assorted models of useful primates, ranging in size from the gorilla down to the baboon, each adapted to a special kind of work. It is not putting too much strain on the imagination to assume that geneticists could produce a super-ape, able to understand some scores of words, and capable of being trained for such jobs as picking fruit, cleaning up the litter in parks, shining shoes, collecting garbage, doing household chores, and even baby-sitting (though I have known some babies I would not care to trust with a valuable ape). Apes could do many jobs, such as cleaning streets and the more repetitive types of agricultural work, without supervision, though they might need protection from those exceptional specimens of Homo sapiens who think it amusing to tease or bully anything they consider lower on the evolutionary ladder. For other tasks, such as delivering papers and laboring on the docks, our man-ape would have to work under human overseers; and, incidentally, I would love to see the finale of the twenty-first century version of On the Waterfront in which the honest but hairy hero will drum on his chest after literally taking the wicked labor leader apart. Once a supply of nonhuman workers becomes available, a whole range of low IQ jobs could be thankfully relinquished by mankind, to its great mental and physical advantage. What is more, one of the problems which has plagued so many fictional Utopias would be avoided. There would be none of the degradingly subhuman Epsilons of Huxley's Brave New World to act as a permanent reproach to society, for there is a profound moral difference between breeding sub-men and super-apes, though the end products are much the same. The first would introduce a form of slavery, the second would be a biological triumph which could benefit both men and animals.

单选题He ______ the job because it involved too much traveling.