单选题Historians have only recently begun to note the increase in demand for luxury goods and services that took place in eighteenth-century England. McKendrick has explored the Wedgwood firm's remarkable success in marketing luxury pottery; Plumb has written about the proliferation of provincial theaters, musical festivals, and children's toys and books. While the fact of this consumer revolution is hardly in doubt, three key questions remain: Who were the consumers? What were their motives? And what were the effects of the new demand for luxuries? An answer to the first of these has been difficult to obtain. Although it has been possible to infer from the goods and services actually produced what manufactures and servicing trades thought their customers wanted, only a study of relevant personal documents written by actual consumers will provide a precise picture of who wanted what. We still need to know how large this consumer market was and how far down the social scale the consumer demand for luxury goods penetrated. With regard to this last question, we might note in passing that Thompson, while rightly restoring laboring people to the stage of eighteenth-century English history, has probably exaggerated the opposition of these people to the inroads of capitalist consumerism in general; for example, laboring people in eighteenth-century England readily shifted from homebrewed beer to standardized beer produced by huge, heavily capitalized urban breweries. To answer the question of why consumers became so eager to buy, some historians have pointed to the ability of manufacturers to advertise in a relatively uncensored press. This, however, hardly seems a sufficient answer. McKendrick favors a Veblen model of conspicuous consumption stimulated by competition for status. The "middling sort" bought goods and services because they wanted to follow fashions set by the rich. Again, we may wonder whether this explanation is sufficient. Do not people enjoy buying things as a form of self-gratification? If so, consumerism could be seen as a product of the rise of new concepts of individualism and materialism(a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things), but not necessarily of the frenzy for conspicuous competition. Finally, what were the consequences of this consumer demand for luxuries? McKendrick claims that it goes a long way toward explaining the coming of the Industrial Revolution. But does it? What, for example, does the production of high-quality pottery and toys have to do with the development of iron manufacture or textile mills? It is perfectly possible to have the psychology and reality of a consumer society without a heavy industrial sector. That future exploration of these key questions is undoubtedly necessary should not, however, diminish the force of the conclusion of recent studies; the insatiable demand in eighteenth-century England for frivolous as well as useful goods and services foreshadows our own world.

单选题Humanity uses a little less than half the water available worldwide. Yet occurrences of shortages and droughts are causing famine and distress in some areas, and industrial and agricultural by-products are polluting water supplies. Since the world's population is expected to double in the next 50 years, many experts think we are on the edge of a widespread water crisis. But that doesn't have to be the outcome. Water shortages do not have to trouble the world, if we start valuing water more than we have in the past. Just as we began to appreciate petroleum more after the 1970s oil crises, today we must start looking at water from a fresh economic perspective. We can no longer afford to consider water a virtually free resource of which we can use as much as we like in any way we want. Instead, for all uses except the domestic demand of the poor, governments should price water to reflect its actual value. This means charging a fee for the water itself as well as for the supply costs. Governments should also protect this resource by providing water in more economically and environmentally sound ways. For example, often the cheapest way to provide irrigation water in the dry tropics is through small-scale projects, such as gathering rainfall in depressions and pumping it to nearby cropland. No matter what steps governments take to provide water more efficiently, they must change their institutional and legal approaches to water use. Rather than spread control among hundreds or even thousands of local, regional, and national agencies that watch various aspects of water use, countries should set up central authorities to coordinate water policy.

单选题The pioneers' greatest asset was not their material wealth but their ______. A. fortitude B. simplicity C. companions D. possessions

单选题Marine biologists are calling for Cardigan Bay to be redeveloped as a marine nature ______ to protect the dolphins.

单选题The study of social science is more than the study of the individual social sciences. Although it is tree that to be a good social scientist you must know each of those components, you must also know how they interrelate. By specializing too early, many social scientists can lose sight of the interrelationships that are so essential to understanding modem problems. That's why it is necessary to have a course covering all the social sciences. In fact, it would not surprise me if one day a news story, such as the one above should appear. The preceding passage placed you in the future. To understand how and when social science broke up, you must go into the past. Imagine for a moment that you're a student in 1062, in the Italian city of Bologna, site of one of the first major universities in the western world. The university has no buildings. It consists merely of a few professors and students. There is no tuition fee. At the end of a professor's lecture, if you like it, you pay. And if you don't like it, the professor finds himself without students and without money. If we go back still earlier, say to Greece in the sixth century B. C. , we can see the philosopher Socrates walking around the streets of Athens, arguing with his companions. He asks them questions, and then other questions, leading these people to reason the way he wants them to reason (this became known as the Socratic method). Times have changed since then; universities sprang up throughout the world and created colleges within the universities. Oxford, one of the first universities, now has thirty colleges associated with it, and the development and formalization of educational institutions has changed the roles of both students and faeuhy. As knowledge accumulated, it became more and more difficult for one person to learn, let alone retain it all. In the sixteenth century one could still aspire to know all there was to know, and the definition of the Renaissance man (people were even more sexist then than they are now) was of one who was expected to know about everything. Unfortunately, at least for someone who wants to know everything, the amount of information continues to grow exponentially while the size of the brain has grown only slightly. The way to deal with the problem is not to try to know everything about everything. Today we must specialize. That is why social science separated from the natural sciences and why it, in turn, has been broken down into various subfields, such as anthropology and sociology.

单选题The spelling of many Old English words has been___ in the living language, although their pronunciations have changed. (2011年南京大学考博试题)

单选题The continual______ in temperature make it impossible for me to decide what to wear.

单选题Clark felt that his ______ in one of the most dramatic medical experiments of all time was worth the suffering he underwent. [A] apprehension [B] appreciation [C] presentation [D] participation

单选题In a fog the ______ is very poor, A. probability B. flexibility C. reliability D. visibility

单选题The liner is making a round-the-world ______ this year. All the passengers are making the voyage for pleasure.

单选题"Do you like your boss?" …No, he is too ______.

单选题 In Roman times, defeated enemies were generally put to death as criminals for having offended the emperor of Rome. In the Middle Ages, however, the practice of ransoming, or returning prisoners in exchange for money, became common. Though some saw this as a step toward a more humane society, the primary reasons behind it were economic rather than humanitarian. In those times, rulers had only a limited ability to raise taxes. They could neither force their subjects to fight nor pay them to do so. The promise of material compensation in the form of goods and ransom was therefore the only way of inducing combatants to participate in a war. In the Middle Ages, the predominant incentive for the individual soldier was the expectation of spoils. Although collecting ransom clearly brought financial gain, keeping a prisoner and arranging for his exchange had its costs. Consequently, procedures were devised to reduce transaction costs. One such device was a rule asserting that the prisoner had to assess his own value. This compelled the prisoner to establish a value without too much distortion, indicating too low a value would increase the captive's chances of being killed, while indicating too high a value would either ruin him financially or create a prohibitively expensive ransom that would also result in death.

单选题As the cup final was drawing closer, the injury of the best player was a ______ for the whole team.

单选题The consolidation of the crumbling walls and towers has been carried out in ______ with a program agreed with by the Department of the Environment.

单选题The Flower Market in San Francisco is ______, and it was established in the 1930's.

单选题During our stay in Paris we were splendidly ______ by the Italian Ambassador.

单选题The government is spending hundreds of billions extending the electricity _______to every remote village for the improvement of farmers' livelihoods.