单选题The rocks are very big with______ of colors on them.

单选题He caused a false account of the event ______ in the newspaper.

单选题{{B}}Passage Four{{/B}} Abortion The word alone causes civil conversation to flee the room. This is largely because the pro-choice and pro-life positions are being defined by their extremes, by those who scream accusations instead of arguments. More reasonable voices and concerns, on both sides of the fence, are given little attention. For example, pro-life extremists seem unwilling to draw distinctions between some abortions and others, such as those resulting from rape with an underage child. They would make no exception in the recent real-life case of a woman who discovered in her fifth month that her baby would be born dead due to severe disabilities. On the other hand, pro-choice extremists within feminism insist on holding inconsistent positions. The pregnant woman has an unquestionable right to abort, they claim. Yet if the biological father has no say whatsoever over the woman's choice, is it reasonable to impose legalobligations upon him for child support? Can absolute legal obligation adhere without some sort of corresponding legal rights? The only hope for progress in the abortion dialogue lies in the great excluded middle, in the voices of average people who see something wrong with a young girl forced to bear the baby of a rapist. Any commentary on abortion should include a statement of the writer's position. I represent what seems to be a growing "middle ground" in pro-choice opinion. Legally, I believe in the right of every human being to medically control everything under his or her own skin. Many things people have a legal right to do, however, seem clearly wrong to me: adultery, lying to friends, walking past someone who is bleeding on the street~ Some forms of abortion fall into that category. Morally speaking, my doubts have become so extreme that I could not undergo the procedure past the first three months and I would attempt to dissuade friends from doing so. Partial-birth abortion has thrown many pro-choice advocates into moral chaos. I find it impossible to view photos of late-term abortion--the fetus' contorted features, the tiny fully formed hands, the limbs ripped apart--without experiencing nausea. This reaction makes me ineffectual in advocating the absolute right to abortion. I stand by the principle, "a woman's body, a woman's right" but I don't always like myself for doing so. Fanatics on both sides are using reprehensible and deceitful tactics. An honest dialogue on abortion must start by re-setting the stage, by denouncing the approaches that block communication.

单选题Falling sales and rising overheads have obliged the company to review each customer"slimit. ______

单选题The houses in this area were all erected in ______ of housing regulations.

单选题She ______ a large amount of money from her father when he died.

单选题"What courses are you going to do next semester?"(北京大学2008年试题)"I don't know. But it's about time______on something. "

单选题Skippers must make a report to customs either in person or by telephone, if they have any duty-free goods on board, or are carrying prohibited goods including animals ______ their port of departure. A. with regard to B. ignorant of C. resistant to D. irrespective of

单选题Graphene must surely be one of the most exciting developments in modern science. Indeed, the substance is so extraordinary that it sounds too good to be true—a super-flexible sheet of carbon, just a single atom thick, which is not only the thinnest and strongest material yet known but also conducts heat, light and electricity while being impassable to gas. We have two scientists at the University of Manchester to thank for graphene. What began with Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov playing around with Scotch tape and a block of carbon graphite turned into the discovery of the so-called "miracle material"(and a joint Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010). Now, of course, the race is on to put graphene to use. Even the more sober predictions read like science fiction. From cheap desalination filters to solve the world's creeping water crisis, to next-generation electronics with foldable touch-screens and ultra-speedy biodegradable processors, to super-strong but super-lightweight cars and airplanes, if just a fraction of graphene's potential is fulfilled it will change the world. And that is without even considering either the biomedical or the military possibilities. Nor are researchers hanging back; in 2012 alone, some 10, 000 papers were published on the subject. Britain may be the birthplace of graphene, but we will still have to work hard to hang on to our global lead as scientists and entrepreneurs across the world dash for competitive advantage. The good news is that real efforts are being made to bridge the long-standing gap between university research and commercial products that so often leaves the UK lagging behind, for example, the US. The Government has given more than ￡60m, and graphene research centers are under construction in both Manchester and Cambridge. But there are already signs of progress. Yesterday, Applied Graphene Materials—a spin-off from Durham University—became the second manufacturer of the material to list successfully on the stock market this year. Both its founders' ambitions and investors' belief in them are wholly justified. Graphene's potential is limited only by our imaginations.

单选题Among the freshmen at UCLA ______ thought themselves as Jewish.

单选题His ______ handwriting resulted from haste and carelessness rather than from the inability to form the letters correctly.

单选题2009 was the worst year for the record labels in a decade. (31) was 2008, and before that 2007 and 2006. In fact, industry revenues have been (32) for the past 10 years. Digital sales are growing, but not as fast as traditional sales are falling. Maybe that's because illegal downloads are so easy. People have been (33) intellectual property for centuries, but it used to be a time-consuming way to generate markedly (34) copies. These days, high-quality copies are (35) . According to the Pew Internet project, people use file-sharing software more often than they do iTunes and other legal shops. I'd like to believe, as many of my friends seem to, that this practice won't do much harm. But even as I've heard over the past decade that things weren't (36) bad, that the music industry was moving to a new, better business model, each year's numbers have been worse. Maybe it's time to admit that we may never find a way to (37) consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid. (38) on this problem, the computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg recently noted that although we have strong instinctive feelings about ownership, intellectual property doesn't always (39) that framework. The harm done by individual acts of piracy is too small and too abstract. "The nature of intellectual property," he wrote, "makes it hard to maintain the social and empathic (40) that keep(s) us from taking each other's things. /

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modern science and inventions are revolutionizing the techniques of former explorers, and, although still calling for courage and feats of endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable. Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately charted, and the mapping of the whole of interior presents formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the work. Once their labors are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish one of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, an almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes. The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light, and make possible the establishing of air fields for the future intercontinental air service by making these areas as light as day. Present flying routes will completely change, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flight fiom Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey. The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his parties were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigors of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most health climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sicknesses and disease from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the latter keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world. Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few years ago was regarded as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active centre of human life and endeavor.

单选题{{B}}Passage Four{{/B}} The evolution of sex ratios has produced, in most plants and animals with separate sexes, approximately equal numbers of males and females. Why should this be so? Two main kinds of answers have been offered. One is couched in terms of advantage to population. It is argued that the sex ratio will evolve so as to maximize the number of meetings between individuals of the opposite sex. This is essentially a "group selection" argument. The other, and in my view correct, type of answer was first put forward by Fisher in 1930. This "genetic" argument starts from the assumption that genes can influence the relative numbers of male and female offspring produced, by an individual carrying the genes. That sex ratio will be favored which maximizes the number of descendants an individual will have and hence the number of gene copies transmitted. Suppose that the population consisted mostly of females: then an individual who produced sons only would have more grandchildren. In contrast, if the population consisted mostly of males, it would pay to have daughters. If, however, the population consisted of equal numbers of males and females, sons and daughters would be equally valuable. Thus a one-to-one sex ratio is the only stable ratio; it is an "evolutionarily stable strategy." Although Fisher wrote before the mathematical theory of games had been developed, his theory incorporates the essential feature of a game-that the best strategy to adopt depends on what others are doing. Since Fisher's time, it has been realized that genes can sometimes influence the chromosome or gamete in which they find themselves so that the gamete will be more likely to participate in fertilization. If such a gene occurs on a sex-determining (X or Y) chromosome, then highly aberrant sex ratios can occur. But more immediately relevant to game theory are the sex ratios in certain parasitic wasp species that have a large excess of females. In these species, fertilized eggs develop into females and unfertilized eggs into males. A female stores sperm and can determine the sex of each egg she lays by fertilizing it or leaving it unfertilized. By Fisher's argument, it 'should still pay a female to produce equal numbers of sons and daughters. Hamilton, noting that the eggs develop within their host--the larva of another insect--and that the newly emerged adult wasps mate immediately and disperse, offered a remarkably cogent analysis. Since only one female usually lays eggs in a given larva, it would pay her to produce one male only, because this one male could fertilize all his sisters on emergence. Like Fisher, Hamilton looked for an evolutionarily stable strategy, but he went a step further in recognizing that he was looking for a strategy.

单选题In order to understand what a myth really is, must we choose between platitude and sophism? Some claim that human societies merely express, through their mythology, fundamental feelings common to the whole of mankind, such as love, hate, or revenge or that they try to provide some kind of explanations for phenomena which they cannot otherwise understand—astronomical, meteorological, and the like. But why should these societies do it in such elaborate and devious ways, when all of them are also acquainted with empirical explanations? On the other hand, psychoanalysts and many anthropologists have shifted the problems away from the natural or cosmological toward the sociological and psychological fields. But then the interpretation becomes too easy: if a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and the social relations; but should the actual data be conflicting, it would be as readily claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for repressed feelings. Whatever the situation, a clever dialectic will always find a way to pretend that a meaning has been found. Mythology confronts the student with a situation which at first sight appears contradictory. On the one hand, it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity. Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable relation can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: if the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? It is precisely this awareness of a basic antinomy pertaining to the nature of myth that may lead us toward its solution. For the contradiction which we face is very similar to that which in earlier times brought considerable worry to the first philosophers concerned with linguistic problems; linguistics could only begin to evolve as a science after this contradiction had been overcome. Ancient philosophers reasoned about language the way we do about mythology. On the one hand, they did notice that in a given language certain sequences of sounds were associated with definite meanings, and they earnestly aimed at discovering a reason for the linkage between those sounds and that meaning. Their attempt, however, was thwarted from the very beginning by the fact that the same sounds were equallypresent in other languages although the meaning they conveyed was entirely different. The contradiction was surmounted only by the discovery that it is the combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides the significant data. To invite the mythologist to compare his precarious situation with that of the linguist in the pre-scientific stage is not enough. As a matter of fact we may thus be led only from one difficulty to another. There is a very good reason why myth cannot simply be treated as language if its specific problems are to be solved; myth is language; to be known, myth has to be told; it is a part of human speech. In order to preserve its specificity we must be able to show that it is both the same things as language. And also something different from it. Here, too, the past experience of linguists may help us. For language itself can be analyzed into things which are at the same time similar and yet different. This is precisely what is expressed in Saussure's distinction between langue and parole, one being the structural side of language, the other the statistical aspect of it, langue belonging to a reversible time, parole being nonreversible. If those two levels already exist in language, then a third one can conceivably be isolated

单选题 In the past few decades, remarkable findings have been made in ethology, the study of animal social behavior. Earlier scientists had{{U}} (21) {{/U}}that nonhuman social life was almost totally instinctive or fixed by genetics. Much more careful observation has shown that{{U}} (22) {{/U}}variation occurs among the social ties of most species, showing that [earning is a part of social life. That is, the{{U}} (23) {{/U}}are not solely fixed by the genes.{{U}} (24) {{/U}}, the learning that occurs is often at an early age in a process that is called imprinting. Imprinting is clearly{{U}} (25) {{/U}}instinctive, but it is not quite like the learning of humans, it is something in between the two. An illustration best{{U}} (26) {{/U}}the nature of imprinting. Once, biologists thought that ducklings followed the mother duck because of instincts. Now we know that. shortly{{U}} (27) {{/U}}they hatch, ducklings fix{{U}} (28) {{/U}}any object about the size of a duck and will henceforth follow it. So ducklings may follow a basketball or a briefcase if these are{{U}} (29) {{/U}}for the mother duck at the time when imprinting occurs. Thus, social ties can be considerably{{U}} (30) {{/U}}, even ones that have a considerable base{{U}} (31) {{/U}}by genetics. Even among the social insects something like imprinting{{U}} (32) {{/U}}influence social behavior. For example, biologists once thought bees communicated with others purely{{U}} (33) {{/U}}instinct. But, in examining a "dance" that bees do to indicate the distance and direction of a pollen source, observers found that bees raised in isolation could not communicate effectively. At a higher level, the genetic base seems to be much more for an all-purpose learning rather than the more specific responses of imprinting. Chimpanzees, for instance, generally{{U}} (34) {{/U}}very good mother but Jane Goodall reports that some chimps carry the infant. upside down or{{U}} (35) {{/U}}fail to nurture the young.

单选题In order to understand a problem thoroughly, da Vinci ______.

单选题Such initiatives can pay generous dividends in a continent ______ a large and talented scientific community which, although largely educated in the United States and in Europe, is strongly inclined to return home to do science.

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.