单选题The poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks has been praised for deepening the significance of personal and social experiences so that these experiences become universal in their implication. She has also been praised for her "sense of form, which is basic and remarkable". Many of her poems are concerned with a Black community named Bronzeville, on the south side of Chicago. Her literary skill makes Bronzeville more than just a place on a map. This community, like all important literary places (Robinson's Tilbury Town and Masters' Spoon River, for example), becomes a testing ground of personality, a place where the raw material of experience is shaped by imagination and where the joys and trials of being human are both sung and judged. The qualities for which Brooks's poetry is noted are (as one critic has pointed out) "boldness, invention, a daring to experiment, and a naturalness that does not scorn literature but absorbs it". Her love for poetry began early. At the age of seven, she "began to put rhymes together", and when she was thirteen, one of her poems was published in a children's magazine. During her teens she contributed more than seventy-five poems to a Chicago newspaper. In 1941 she began to attend a class in writing poetry at the South Side Community Art Center, and several years later, her poems began to appear in Poetry and other magazines. Her first collection of poems. A Street in Bronzeville was published in 1945. Four years later, Annie Allen, her second collection of poems, appeared. In 1950, Annie Allen was awarded a Pulitzer prize for poetry. A novel, Maud Martha, about a young Black girl growing up in Chicago, published in 1953, was praised for its warmth and insights. In 1963, her Selected Poems appeared.

单选题Costs of doing so come cheap when measured against an overall advertising ______.

单选题In mountainous regions, much of the snow that falls is compacted into ice.

单选题What ______ about that article in the newspaper was that its writer showed an attitude cool enough, professional enough and, therefore, cruel enough when facing that tragedy.

单选题Of the 1, 200 million people who call themselves Chinese, ______ a very small number speak what is referred to as standard Chinese.

单选题Walls and wail building have played a very important role in Chinese culture. These people, from the dim mists of prehistory have been wall-conscious; from the Neolithic period—when ramparts of pounded earth were used-to the Communist Revolution, walls were an essential part of any village. Not only towns and villages, the houses and the temples within them were somehow walled, and the houses also had no windows overlooking the street, thus giving the feeling of wandering around a huge maze. The name for "city" in Chinese means wall, and over these walled cities, villages, houses and temples presides the god of walls and mounts, whose duties were, and still are, to protect and be responsible for the welfare of the inhabitants. Thus a great and extremely laborious task such as constructing a wall, which was supposed to run through the country, must not have seemed such an absurdity. However, it is indeed a commom mistake to perceive the great wall as a single architectural structure, and it would also be erroneous to assume that it was built during a single dynasty. For the building of the wall spanned the various dynasties, and each of these dynasties somehow contributed to the reburbishing and the construction of a wall, whose foundations had been laid many centuries ago. It was during the fourth and third century B.C. that each warring state started building walls to protect their kingdoms, both against one another and against the northern nomads. Especially three of these states: the Qin, the Zhao and the Yan, corresponding respectively to the modern provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Hebei, over and above building walls that surrounded their kindoms, also laid the foundations on which Qin Shih Huang Di would build his first continuous Great Wall. The role that the Great Wall played in the growth of Chinese economy was an important one. Throughout the centuries many settlements were established along the new border. The garrison troops were instructed to reclaim wasteland and to plant crops on it, roads and canals were built, to mention just a few of the works carried out. All these undertakings greatly helped to increase the country's trade and cultural exchanges with many remote areas and also with the southern, central and western parts of Asia—the formation of the Silk Route. Builders, garrisons, artisans, farmers and peasants left behind a trail of objects, including inscribed tablets, household articles, and written work, which have become extremely valuable archaeological evidence to the study of defense institutions of the Great Wall and the everyday life of these people who lived and died along the wall.

单选题The price of vegetables ______ according to the weather.

单选题The President declined to deliver the speech himself, ______ a sore throat.

单选题Passage 1 A TIME columnist bears witness to an operation to help triplets with cerebral palsy walk like other boys. Cindy Hickman nearly bled to death the day she gave birth--three months prematurely--to her triplet sons. Weighing less than 2 lbs. each, her babies were alive, but barely. They clung so tenuously to life that her doctors recommended she name them A, B and C. Then, after a year of heroic interventions--brain shunts, tracheotomies, skull remodeling--often requiring emergency helicopter rides to the hospital nearest their rural Tennessee home, the Hickmans learned that their triplets had cerebral palsy. Fifteen years ago there wasn't much that could be done about cerebral palsy, a disorder caused by damage to the motor centers of the brain. But pediatric medicine has come a long way since then, both in intervention before birth, with better prenatal care and various techniques to postpone delivery, and surgical interventions after birth to correct physical deficiencies. So although the incidence of cerebral palsy seems to be increasing (because the odds ofpreemies surviving are so much better), so too are the number of success stories. This is one of them. Lane, Codie and Wyatt (as the Hickman boys are called) have spastic cerebral palsy, the most common form, accounting for nearly 80% of cases. "We first noticed that they weren't walking when they should," Cindy recalls. "Instead they were only doing the combat crawl." Their brains seemed to be developing age appropriately, but their muscles were unnaturally stiff, making walking difficult if not impossible. Happily, spastic cerebral palsy is also the most treatable form of CP, largely thanks to a procedure known as selective dorsal rhizotomy, in which the nerve roots that are causing the problem are isolated and severed. Among the first to champion SDR in the U.S. in the late 1980s was Dr. T.S. Park, a Korean-born pediatric neurosurgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., who has performed more than 800 of these operations and hopes to do an additional 1,000 before he retires. Having performed the operation myself as a resident in neurosurgery, I was eager to see how the country's most prolific SDR surgeon does it. Last month I got an opportunity to stand by his side as he operated on 3-year-old Lane Hickman. Peering through a microscope and guided by an electric probe, we were able to distinguish between the two groups of nerve roots leaving the spinal cord. The ventral roots send information to the muscle; the dorsal roots send information back to the spinal cord. The dorsal roots cause spasticity, and if just the right ones are severed, the symptoms can be greatly reduced. Nearly half a million Americans suffer from cerebral palsy. Not all are candidates for SDR, but Park estimates that as many as half may be. He gets the best results with children between ages 2 and 6 who were born prematurely and have stiffness only in their legs. He is known for performing the operation very high up in the spine, right where the nerve roots exit the spinal cord. It's riskier that way, but the recovery is faster, and in Park's skilled hands, the success rate is higher. Cindy and Jeremy Hickman will testify to that. Just a few weeks after the procedure, two of their sons are walking almost normally and the third is rapidly improving.

单选题The author mentions all of the following as requirements for slang expressions to be created except

单选题The history of Western music properly begins with the music of the Christian, Church. But all through the Middle Ages and even to the present time men have continually turned back to Greece and Rome for instruction, for correction, and for inspiration in their several fields of work; this has been true in music--though with some important differences. R6man literature, for example, never ceased to exert influence in the Middle Ages, and this influence became much greater in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when more Roman works became known, at the same time, too, the surviving literature of Greece was gradually recovered. But in literature, as well as in some other fields (notably sculpture), medieval or Renaissance artists had the advantage of being able to study and, if they so desired, imitate the models of antiquity. The actual poems or statues were before them. In music this was not so. The Middle Ages did not possess a single example of Greek or Roman music--nor, it may be added, are we today much better off. About a dozen examples--half of them were fragments--of Greek music have been discovered, nearly all from comparatively late periods, but there is no general agreement as to just how they were meant to sound; there are no authentic remains of ancient Roman music. So we, as well as the men of medieval times, derive nearly all our knowledge of this art in the ancient civilizations at second hand from a few rather vague accounts of performances, but mostly from theatrical treatises and literary descriptions.

单选题 The idea of public works projects as a device to prevent or control depression was designed as a means of creating job opportunities for unemployed workers and as a "pump-priming" device to aid business to revive. It was conceived during the early years of the New Deal Era (1933--1937). By 1933, the number of unemployed workers had reached about 13 million. This meant that about 50 million people--about one-third of the nation--were without means of support. At first, direct relief in the form of cash or food was provided these people. This made them recipients of government charity. In order to remove this stigma and restore to the unemployed some measure of respectability and human dignity, a plan was devised to create governmentally sponsored work projects that private industry would not or could not provide. This would also stimulate production and revive business activity. The best way to explain how this procedure is expected to work is to explain how it actually worked when it was first tried. The first experiment with it was the creation of the Works Project Administration (WPA). This agency set up work projects in various fields in which there were many unemployed. For example, unemployed actors were organized into theater projects, orchestras were organized for unemployed musicians, teaching projects for unemployed teachers, and even writers' projects for unemployed writers. Unemployed laborers were put to work building or maintaining roads, parks, playgrounds, or public buildings. These were all temporary "work relief" projects rather than permanent work opportunities. More substantial work projects of a permanent nature were organized by another agency, the Public Works Administration (PWA). This agency undertook the planning of construction of schools, houses, post offices, dams, and other public structures. It entered into contracts with private construction firms to erect them, or it loaned money to local or state governments which undertook their construction. This created many jobs in the factories producing the material as well as in the projects themselves, and greatly reduced the number of unemployed. Still another agency which provided work projects for the unemployed was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This agency provided job opportunities for youths aged 16 to 20 to work in national parks or forests clearing land, guarding against fires, building roads, or doing other conservation work. In the event of a future depression, the federal government might revive any or all of the above methods to relieve unemployment and stimulate business.

单选题In this great global clash of interests, it is time for both sides to soften their anger and seek new ways to get along with each other. If sanity is to prevail, the guiding policy must not be ______ but cooperation and conservation. A. confrontation B. reconciliation C. ration D. resumption

单选题The room is so ______ with furniture—hat it is hard to move about. A) muddled B) cluttered C) distributed D) scattered

单选题You may get away with dishonesty for a while, but sooner or later you'll be ______.

单选题It ______ to me that he was the first person to help us in those difficult times

单选题Personalized genetic diagnosis and therapy say you"re young and healthy, and you go in for a routine physical. Your doctor takes a blood sample and has it shipped to a lab. There, a medical technologist places your serum sample on a glass chip the size of a postage stamp. That gene chip might contain up to 50,000 microscopic spots—each with one of the genes in the human genome. When the doctor calls you with the results, he"ll tell you which of thousands of human diseases you"re at risk for. If you have a defective gene that"s placing you at risk for disease, he might treat you with a healthy version of the gene to make up for it, keeping you out of harm"s way. Soon, such diagnoses and treatments could be routine, says Mark Kay, MD, a professor of genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine and president of the American Society of Gene Therapy. "In five years, you may be able to go to referral centers and get gene therapy," he says. Although gene therapists have talked like that for a while, and the field has tremendous promise, so far they have demonstrably cured humans of just one disease: severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). Known as the bubble-boy disease, it decimates the immune system and causes children to die young from infections. While the treatment looks promising, the virus used to deliver the gene in one trial may have activated a gene that causes cancer. Such safety issues have dogged gene therapy. But gene therapists are pressing on. More than a dozen advanced clinical trials are underway that use genes to treat a variety of cancers, and other trials are ongoing for multiple sclerosis, AIDS and cystic fibrosis. Dr. Losordo has also begun a large trial of a gene therapy that seems to help patients regrow blood vessels that supply the heart—"grow your own bypass, if you will," he says. "It"s a very exciting time." The best gene therapies just treat symptoms. The cells and tissues that make up our body still age, decay and die. "We know of no intervention that will slow, stop or reverse the aging process in humans," says Leonard Hayflick, PhD, professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. Also, lifesaving technologies and treatments don"t come cheap, and sometimes terrible side effects emerge. "We will face some very difficult choices," says Thomas Murray, PhD, president of the Hastings Center in Garrison, New York, a think tank that explores ethical issues in biotechnology and health care. Fair enough. But perhaps it"s OK, for now, to step back and marvel at just how far we"ve come.

单选题 Passage 4 In her 26 years of teaching English, Shannon McGuire has seen countless misplaced commas, misspelled words and sentence fragments. But the instructor at US's Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge said her job is getting harder every day. "I kid you not, the number of errors that I've seen in the past few years have multiplied five times," she said. Experts say email and instant messaging are at least partly to blame for an increasing indifference toward the rules of grammar, spelling and sentence structure. They say the problem is most noticeable in college students and recently graduates. "They used to at least feel guilty (about mistakes)," said Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, D. C. "They didn't necessarily write a little better, but at least they felt guilty." Ironically, Baron's latest book, "Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading," became a victim of sloppy proofreading. The book's title is capitalized differently on the cover, spine and title page. "People used to lose their jobs over this," she said. "And now they just say 'whatever'." "Whatever" describes Jeanette Henderson's attitude toward writing. The sophomore at the University of Louisiana at Monroe admits that her reliance on spellcheck has hurt her grades in English class. "Computer has spoiled us," she said. But the family and consumer sciences major believes her future bosses won't mind the mistakes as much as her professor does. "They're not going to check semicolons, commas and stuff like that," Henderson said. LSU's McGuire said she teaches her students to use distinct writing styles that fit their purpose. She emphasizes that there's the informal language of an email to a friend, but there's also the well thought out and structured academic or professional style of writing. It's not just email and instant messaging that are contributing to slack writing habits. Society as a whole is becoming more informal. Casual wear at work used to be reserved for Friday, for example, but is now commonplace at most offices. There's also a greater emphasis on youth culture, and youth tend to use instant messaging more than adults do. English language has been neglected at different points in history but always rebounds. During Shakespearen times, for example, spelling wasn't considered important, and early publishers rarely proofread. There will likely be a social force that recognizes the need for clear writing and swings the pendulum back.