单选题Industrial production managers coordinate the resources and activities required to produce millions of goods every year in the United States. Although their duties vary from plant to plant, industrial production managers share many of the same major responsibilities. These responsibilities include production scheduling, staffing, procurement and maintenance of equipment, quality control, inventory control, and the coordination of production activities with those of other departments. The primary mission of industrial production managers is planning the production schedule within budgetary limitations and time constraints. They do this by analyzing the plant's personnel and capital resources to select the best way of meeting the production quota. Industrial production managers determine, often using mathematical formulas, which machines will be used, whether new machines need to be purchased, whether overtime or extra shifts are necessary, and what the sequence of production will be. They monitor the production run to make sure that it stays on schedule and correct any problems that may arise. Industrial production managers also must monitor product standards. When quality drops below the established standard, they must determine why standards are not being maintained and how to improve the product. If the problem relates to the quality of work performed in the plant, the manager may implement better training programs, reorganize the manufacturing process, or institute employee suggestion or involvement programs. If the cause is substandard materials, the manager works with the purchasing department to improve the quality of the product's components. Because the work of many departments is interrelated, managers work closely with heads of other departments such as sales, procurement, and logistics to plan and implement company goals, policies, and procedures. For example, the production manager works with the procurement department to ensure that plant inventories are maintained at their optimal level. This is vital to a firm's operation because maintaining the inventory of materials necessary for production ties up the firm's financial resources, yet insufficient quantities cause delays in production. A breakdown in communications between the production manager and the purchasing department can cause slowdown and a failure to meet production schedules. Just-in-time production techniques have reduced inventory levels, making constant communication among the manager, suppliers, and purchasing departments even more important. Computers play an integral part in this coordination. They also are used to provide up-to-date information on inventory, the status of work in progress, and quality standards. Production managers usually report to the plant manager or the vice president for manufacturing, and may act as liaison between executives and first line supervisors. In many plants, one production manager is responsible for all aspects of production. In large plants with several operations, there are managers in charge of each operation, such as machining, assembly, or finishing.

单选题Older people always enjoy the __________ of their relatives.

单选题Because alcohol is a solvent, it is a {{U}}component{{/U}} of many liquid medicines.

单选题The human nose is an underrated tool. Humans are often thought to be insensitive smellers compared with animals, but this is largely because, 1 animals, we stand upright. This means that our noses are 2 to perceiving those smells which float through the air, missing the majority of smells which stick to surfaces. In fact, though, we are extremely sensitive to smells, even if we do not generally realize it. Our noses are capable of 3 human smells even when these are 4 to far below one part in one million. Strangely, some people find that they can smell one type of flower but not another, whereas others are sensitive to the smells of both flowers. This may be because some people do not have the genes necessary to generate 5 smell receptors in the nose. These receptors are the cells which sense smells and send 6 to the brain. However, it has been found that even people insensitive to a certain smell at first can suddenly become sensitive to it when 7 to it often enough. The explanation for insensitivity to smell seems to be that brain finds it inefficient to keep all smell receptors working all the time but can 8 new receptors if necessary. This may also explain why we are not usually sensitive to our own smells we simply do not need to be. We are not 9 of the usual smell of our own house but we notice new smells when we visit someone else"s. The brain finds it best to keep smell receptors 10 for unfamiliar and emergency signals such as the smell of smoke, which might indicate the danger of fire.

单选题Stable political conditions and freedom (from) foreign invasion enable a country to develop its natural resources peacefully and steadily, and (to produce) more wealth than (the other) country equally well served by nature but (less well) ordered.

单选题The Maya civilization reached its period of greatest development about A. D. 250 and continued to ______ for hundreds of years.

单选题Through the discussion they gained an extraordinary insight into the complexity of women's emotions.

单选题 In promising to fuse media as diverse as television, telephone communication, video games, music and data transmission, the era of digital convergence goes better than yesterday's celebrated "information superhighway". Yet achieving this single technology is far from straightforward. There are currently three major television broadcast standards, and they are all incompatible with each other. But this is nothing compared to the many technologies supporting the Internet, each with a different bandwidth and physical media. The problems faced in designing platforms and communication systems that will be accepted across the world can appear insuperable. Even once global standards are assured, however, a further obstacle lies in wait. The Internet is plagued by long, erratic response times because it is a pull-technology, driven by patterns of user demands. Push technology, on the other hand, reverses the relationship: servers simply send information to passive users, as in television and radio. But if some form of combination between one-way television flow and interactive Internet is to be the basis of our future media, it is hard to see how it could be operated. Moreover, the problem of fusing Internet with television is also one of defining the services offered. Information, entertainment and relaxation appear at first to be quite different needs. Serious doubts remain over whether consumers will be interested in having to make the sort of mental effort associated with computing while also settling down in front of a sitcom. Besides the issue of consumer habits, infrastructure costs are set to be immense, and will have to be met by national states or the private sector before being passed on to users. Platforms do not necessarily have to be expensive. The mobile phone is a good example of how something that is technologically sophisticated can almost be given away, with its cost recovered through service charges. Users are then coerced through clever marketing to upgrade to newer phones with more features to reinforce their dependence. Whatever the outcome, it is obvious that technology will play an increasing part in our everyday lives. Beyond technology, digital convergence embraces the services, industrial practices and social behavior that form modern society. We have in our hands the technology to construct the most sophisticated machines ever built, but if they are unusable, simply because of their operating instructions, then recent lessons have taught us they will not survive. Whatever we design must be simple, reliable and useful. Perhaps this is where artificial intelligence will come in.

单选题Ironically, the intellectual tools currently being used by the political right to such harmful effect originated on the academic left. In the 1960s and 1970s a philosophical movement called postmodernism developed among humanities professors (26) being deposed by science, which they regarded as right-leaning. Postmodernism (27) ideas from cultural anthropology and relativity theory to argue that truth is (28) and subject to the assumptions and prejudices of the observer. Science is just one of many ways of knowing, they argued, neither more nor less (29) than others, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or women. (30) , they defined science as the way of knowing among Western white men and a tool of cultural (31) . This argument (32) with many feminists and civil-rights activists and became widely adopted, leading to the "political correctness" justifiably (33) by Rush Limbaugh and the "mental masturbation" lampooned by Woody Allen. Acceptance of this relativistic worldview (34) democracy and leads not to tolerance but to authoritarianism. John Locke, one of Jefferson's "trinity of three greatest men," showed (35) almost three centuries ago. Locke watched the arguing factions of Protestantism, each claiming to be the one true religion, and asked. How do we know something to be true? What is the basis of knowledge? In 1689 he (36) what knowledge is and how it is grounded in observations of the physical world in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Any claim that fails this test is "but faith, or opinion, but not knowledge. " It was this idea—that the world is knowable and that objective, empirical knowledge is the most (37) basis for public policy that stood as Jefferson's foundational argument for democracy. By falsely (38) knowledge with opinion, postmodernists and antiscience conservatives alike collapse our thinking back to a pre-Enlightenment era, leaving no common basis for public policy. Public discourse is (39) to endless warring opinions, none seen as more valid than another. Policy is determined by the loudest voices, reducing us to a world in which might (40) right—the classic definition of authoritarianism.

单选题If nothing is done to protect the environment, millions of species that are alive today will have become ______.

单选题The doctor tried to find a {{U}}tactful{{/U}} way of telling her the truth.

单选题The view from the 23rd floor of the sleek tower on Barcelona's Avenida Diagonal ______ opaquely as summer smog oozes across the Olympic landscape below. A. subtracts B. shimmers C. simulates D. repents

单选题Can the Internet help patients jump the line at the doctor's office? The Silicon Valley Employers Forum, a sophisticated group of technology companies, is launching a pilot program to test online "virtual visits" between doctors at three big local medical groups and about 6,000 employees and their families. The six employers taking part in the Silicon Valley initiative, including heavy hitters such as Oracle and Cisco Systems, hope that online visits will mean employees won't have to skip work to tend to minor ailments or to follow up on chronic conditions. "With our long commutes and traffic, driving 40 miles to your doctor in your hometown can be a big chunk of time," says Cindy Conway, benefits director at Cadence Design Systems, one of the participating companies. Doctors aren't clamoring to chat with patients online for free; they spend enough unpaid time on the phone. Only 1 in 5 has ever E-mailed a patient, and just 9 percent are interested in doing so, according to the research firm Cyber Dialogue. "We are not stupid," says Stifling Somers, executive director of the Silicon Valley employers group. "Doctors getting paid is a critical piece in getting this to work." In the pilot program, physicians will get $ 20 per online consultation, about what they get for a simple office visit. Doctors also fear they'll be swamped by rambling E-mails that tell everything but what's needed to make a diagnosis. So the new program will use technology supplied by Healinx, an Alameda, Calif-based start-up. Healinx' s "Smart Symptom Wizard" questions patients and. turns answers into a succinct message. The company has online dialogues for 60 common conditions. The doctor can then diagnose the problem and outline a treatment plan, which could include E-mailing a prescription or a face-to-face visit. Can E-mail replace the doctor's office? Many conditions, such as persistent cough, require stethoscope to discover what's wrong and to avoid a malpractice suit. Even Larry Bonham, head of one of the doctor's groups in the pilot, believes the virtual doctor's visits offer a "very narrow" sliver of service between phone calls to an advice nurse and a visit to the clinic. The pilot program, set to end in nine months, also hopes to determine whether online visits will boost worker productivity enough to offset the cost of the service. So far, the Internet's record in the health field has been underwhelming. The experiment is "a huge roll of the dice for Healing", notes Michael Barrett, an analyst at Internet consulting firm Forester Research. If the "Web visits" succeed, expect some HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) to pay for online visits. If doctors, employers, and patients aren't satisfied, figure on one more E-health start-up to stand down.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} Recent changes in federal government priorities have seen a reduction in financial support for parents who use childcare. This is occurring at a time when there is increasing social and financial pressure on parents, particularly mothers, to work. The issue of childcare and working mothers has been the subject of dispute for some time. Many argue that the best place for children is always in their own homes with their own parents. However, it is my contention that there are many advantages to be had from using childcare and the government should provide more financial assistance to parents who do so. It has been argued that children who attend childcare centers at an early age miss out an important early learning that occurs in parent-child interaction. These children, so this argument goes, may be educationally disadvantaged later in life. However, childcare center may actually assist children in their early learning. They give children an opportunity to mix with other children and to develop social skills at an early age. Indeed, a whole range of learning occurs in childcare centers. Another argument against the use of childcare facilities is that children can be emotionally deprived in these facilitates compared to the home. This argument assumes that the best place for children is to be at their parents', especially mothers', side for twenty-four hours a day. It claims that children's emotional development can be damaged when they are left in childcare facilities. However, parents and children need to spend some time apart. Moreover, children became less dependent on their parents and parents themselves are less stressed and more effective care-givers when there are periods of separation. In fact, recent studies indicate that the parent-child relationship can be improved by the use of high-quality childcare facilities. It could further be asserted that the government and the economy as a whole cannot afford the enormous cost involved in supporting childcare for working parents. However, working parents actually contribute to the national economy. They are able to utilize their productive skills and pay income tax, while non-working parents can become a drain on the tax system through dependent spouse and other rebates. In conclusion, government support for childcare services assists individual families and is important for the economic well-being of the whole nation.

单选题 Despite his doctor's note of caution, he never ______ from drinking and smoking.

单选题The study shows that laying too much emphasis on exams is likely to ______ students’ enthusiasm in learning English. A. hold back B. hold off C. hold down D. adopt

单选题Parents of wailing(哀号)babies, take comfort: You are not alone. Chimpanzee babies fuss. Sea gull chicks squawk. Burying beetle larvae tap their parents' legs. Throughout the animal kingdom, babies know how to get their parents' attention. Exactly why evolution has produced all this fussing, squawking and tapping is a question many biologists are trying to answer. Someday, that answer may shed some light on the mystery of crying in human babies. " It may point researchers in the right direction to find the cause of excessive crying," said Joseph Soltis, a bioacoustics expert at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista. Florida. Soltis published an article on the evolution of crying in the current issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Young animals vary in how much they cry, squawk or otherwise communicate with their parents, and studies with mice, beetles and monkeys show that this variation is partly based on genes. Some level of crying in humans, of course, is based on gas pains and messy diapers. But as for the genetic contribution, you might expect that natural selection would favor genes for noisier children, since they would get more attention. Before long, however, this sort of deception may be ruinous. If the signals of offspring became totally unreliable, parents would no longer benefit from paying attention. Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that natural selection should therefore favor so-called honest advertisements. Some biologists have speculated that these honest advertisements may not just tell a parent which offspring are hungry. They might also show their parent that they are healthy and vigorous and therefore worth some extra investment. The babies of monkeys cry out to their mothers and tend to cry even more around the time their mothers wean(断奶)them. The mothers, in response, begin to ignore most of their babies' distress calls, since most turn out to be false alarms. " Initially, mothers respond any time an infant cries," said Dado Maestripieri, a primatologist at the University of Chicago. "But as the cries increase, they respond less and less. They become more skeptical. So infants start crying less. So they go through these cycles, adjusting their responses. " Kim Bard, a primatologist at the University of Plymouth in England, has spent more than a decade observing chimpanzee babies. "Chimps can cry for a long time if something terrible is happening to them, but when you pick them up, they stop," Bard said. "I've never seen any chimpanzees in the first three months of life be inconsolable. " Maestripieri and other researchers say these evolutionary forces may have also shaped the cries of human babies. "All primate infants cry. " Maestripieri said. "It's a very conserved behavior. It's not something humans have evolved on their own. "

单选题Restrained from the slave-trade—the favorite traffic of the chiefs—A(opposed in) their marauding propensity, and threatened by the desertion of their slaves and women, who begin to understand that by flight into the towns of the Republic they can free themselves from the domestic institutions of slavery and polygamy, B( it is not probable that) heathen princes and chiefs would be favorable to the government C(which they imagine is operating) detrimentally in these respects toD( its interest).

单选题The word hospice is hundreds of years old. It comes to us from the time called the Middle Ages in Europe. Religious groups then provided hospice as a place where traveler could stay. Sometimes the groups also offered a place for the sick and the dying. Today the word hospice means more than a place. It means a way of caring for the dying. In the modern sense of the word, it means that, if possible, dying people can receive care at home during their last days; and the health-care workers do not try to lengthen the lives of the dying with modern medical equipment. Instead, care-givers make every effort to control or stop the patient's pain. It also means that patients get help for their emotional needs in addition to their physical needs. A British woman Cicely Saunders was the first major activist for hospice care in modern times. Cicely Saunders worked as a nurse in a hospital right after World War II , where she met a man who was dying of cancer. Together they found ideas about the best possible treatment for people who would never get well again. They talked about treatments that would permit patients to discuss their feelings and to take part in activities meaningful to them. They planned a system that would allow dying people to be surrounded by the people and things they loved most. The dying man gave Cicely Saunders enough money to study to become a doctor. By 1967 Dr. Saunders had organized and opened St. Christopher's Hospice in London. In 1974, after the America's first hospice started in New Haven, others followed suit in cities throughout the country. Organizers had a difficult job. They had to teach the public about the idea of hospice. They had to get money from companies, religious groups and citizens. And they had to negotiate with local govermments to use public money to care for the dying. Thanks to their unyielding determination and painstaking efforts, hospice has grown in America. Dr. Jo Magno, the President of the National Hospice Organization, said that working with the dying occasionally made her sad. Yet she remembers the words of Dr. Cicely Saunders— "We can not add days to life, but we can add life to days. "