单选题When the rent was due. the poor man ______ for more time. A. pleaded B. squashed C. exerted D. cursed

单选题Embarrassed, I nodded, trying to think of some way to ______ my error. A. make do with B. make up for C. go in for D. go along with

单选题Most people who travel long distance complain of jetlag. Jetlag makes business travelers less productive and more prone (21) making mistakes. It is actually caused by (22) of your "body clock" --a small cluster of brain cells that controls the timing of biological (23) . The body clock is designed for a (24) rhythm of daylight and darkness, so that it is thrown out of balance when it (25) daylight and darkness at the "wrong" times in a new time zone. The (26) of jetlag often persist for days (27) the internal body clock slowly adjusts to the new time zone. Now a new anti-jetlag system is (28) that is based on proven (29) pioneering scientific research. Dr, Martin Mooreede had (30) a practical strategy to adjust the body clock much sooner to the new time zone (31) controlled exposure to bright light. The time zone shift is easy to accomplish and eliminates (32) of the discomfort of jetlag. A successful time zone shift depends on knowing the exact times to either (33) or avoid bright light. Exposure to light at the wrong time can actually make jetlag worse. The proper schedule (34) light exposure depends a great deal on (35) travel plans.

单选题He believed that the greatest of his ______ was that he'd never had a college education. A. griefs B. misfortunes C. disasters D. sorrows

单选题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 longevity (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) options 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 knowledge or on natural resources, the living companies in our study were able to adapt themselves to changes in the world around them. As wars, depressions, technologies, and politics 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. Lord 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 organization and identifying with its achievements is often dismissed softly, but case histories repeatedly 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 themselves to be stewards of a longstanding enterprise. Their top priority was keeping the institution 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 recognized 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 (透析) services 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 successfully for hundreds of years. Given this basic personality, what priorities do the managers of living companies set for themselves and their employees?

单选题In the early clays of the United States, postal charges were paid by the recipient and charges varied with the distance carried. In 1825, the United States Congress permitted local postmasters to give letters to mail carriers for home delivery, but these carriers received no government salary and their entire compensation on what they were paid by the recipients of individual letters. In 1847 the United States Post Office Department adopted the idea of a postage stamp, which of course simplified the payment for postal service but caused grumbling by those who did not like to prepay. Besides, the stamp covered only delivery to the post office and did not include carrying it to a private address. In Philadelphia, for example, with a population of 150000, people still had to go to the post office to get their mail. The confusion and congestion of individual citizens looking for their letters was itself enough to discourage use of the mail. It is no wonder that, during the years of these cumbersome arrangements, private letter-carrying and express businesses developed. Although their activities were only semilegal, they thrived, and actually advertised that between Boston and Philadelphia they were a half-day speedier than the government mail. The government postal service lost volume to private competition and was not able to handle efficiently even the business it had. Finally, in 1863, Congress provided that the mail carriers who delivered the mail from the post offices to private addresses should receive a government salary, and that there should be no extra charge for that delivery. But this delivery service was at first confined to cities, and free home delivery became a mark of urbanism. As late as 1887, a town had to have 10000 people to be eligible for free home delivery. In 1890, of the 75 million people in the United States, fewer than 20 million had mail delivered free to their doors. The rest, nearly three-quarters of the population, still received no mail unless they went to their post office.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} Why does the Foundation concentrate its support on basic rather than applied research? Basic research is the very heart of science, and its cumulative product is the capital of scientific progress, a capital that must be constantly increased as the demands upon it rise. The goal of basic research is understanding, for its own sake. Understanding of the structure of the atom or the nerve ceil, the explosion of a spiral nebula or the distribution of cosmic dust, the causes of earthquakes and droughts, or of man as a behaving creature and of the social forces that are created whenever two or more human beings come into contact with one another--the scope is staggering, but the commitment to truth is the same. If the commitment were to a particular result, conflicting evidence might be Overlooked or, with the best will in the world, simply not appreciated. Moreover, the practical applications of basic research frequently cannot be anticipated. When Roentgen, the physicist, discovered X-rays, he had no idea of their usefulness to medicine. Applied research, undertaken to solve specific practical problems, has an immediate attractiveness because the results can be seen and enjoyed. For practical reasons, the sums spent on applied research in any country always far exceed those for basic research, and the proportions are more unequal in the less developed countries. Leaving aside the funds devoted to research by industry--which is naturally far more concerned with applied aspects because these increase profits quickly--the funds the U.S. Government allots to basic research currently amount to about 7 percent of its overall research and development funds. Unless adequate safeguards are provided, applied research invariably tends to drive out basic. Then, as Dr. Waterman has pointed out, "Developments will inevitably be undertaken prematurely, career incentives will gravitate strongly toward applied science, and the opportunities for making major scientific discoveries will be lost. Unfortunately, pressures to emphasize new developments, without corresponding emphasis upon pure science tend to degrade the quality of the nation% technology in the long run, rather than to improve it."

单选题In mountainous regions, much of the snow that falls is compacted into ice. A. hauled B. compressed C. compiled D. harnessed

单选题Glass can be easily molded into all kinds of forms because ______.

单选题If excellent work results in frequent pay increases or promotions, the workers will have greater ______ to produce. A. incentive B. initiative C. instruction D. instinct

单选题If I had a car of my own, I______it to your sister yesterday.

单选题For someone whose life has been shattered, Hiroshi Shimizu is remarkably calm. In a cramped Tokyo law office, the subdued, bitter man in his 30s—using an assumed name for the interview relates how he became infected with the HIV virus from tainted blood products sold by Japanese hospitals to hemophiliacs during the mid-1980s. "I was raped," says Shimizu. "I never thought doctors would give me bad medicine. " last year, Shimizu was shocked when a doctor newly transferred to his hospital broke the news. Four years earlier, he had asked his previous doctor if he could safely marry. "He told me: 'There's absolutely no problem,' even though he knew [I was infected]," Shimizu says. "I could have passed it to my wife. " Luckily, he hasn't. Shimizu is one of more than 2,000 hemophiliacs and their loved ones infected with the deadly virus before heat-treated blood products became available in Japan. It's a tragedy—and now it's a national scandal. In recent weeks, the country has been rocked by charges that Japanese drug and hospital companies kept selling tainted blood even after the AIDS threat was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. Even worse is the charge that the Japanese government knowingly allowed this dangerous practice as part of a policy to protect domestic companies from foreign competition. Japan's bureaucrats are already under attack for their role in the banking fiasco. As the AIDS scandal unfolds, Japanese confidence in government could erode even further. Big settlements in a related lawsuit may also set a precedent in other AIDS liability cases around the world. The origins of the tragedy go back to 1983. By then, scientists were closing in on the virus that causes AIDS, and U. S. health authorities mandated that all blood products be heat-treated to protect hemophiliacs and patients from infection. Japanese authorities were concerned as well: the Health & Welfare Ministry formed an AIDS study group headed by the country's foremost hemophilia expert, Dr. Takeshi Abe. RAIN AND SLEET. What happened next has only just been revealed, thanks to an investigation by new Health Minister Naoto Kan. According to investigators, the ministry group on July 4, 1983, recommended banning untreated blood imports. Since no heat-treated products were then available from Japanese companies, the group also advised allowing emergency imports of heat-treated blood from companies such as U. S. drug giant Baxter International Inc. But a week later, the recommendation was reversed. According to memos recovered from the records of Atsuaki Gunji, then head of the ministry's Biological & antibiotics Div., the recommendation was overturned because it would "deal a blow" to domestic companies. Japan's marketers of blood products bought imports of untreated blood—and they did not have their heat-treatment processes yet. The ministry insisted that Baxter conduct two years of clinical testing in Japan before it used its new heat treatment there. Domestic drug companies, led by Osaka-based Green Cross Ltd. rushed to develop their own treatment processes. Meanwhile, Baxter and other foreign companies that already sold untreated blood products in Japan had to continue the practice if they wanted to stay in the market. The recent revelations have sparked some startling events in a country where discussion of AIDS is still largely taboo. In February, health Minister Kan made front-page news when he officially apologized to HIV-infected hemophiliacs and families who had staged a 72-hour vigil in rain and sleet outside the ministry.

单选题 They employed a consultant to appraise the relative merits of the two computer systems.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Answer all the questions based on the information in the passages below. Passage 1 In the preceding chapter, economic welfare was taken broadly to consist of that group of satisfactions and dissatisfactions which can be brought into relation with a money measure. We have now to observe that this relation is not a direct one, but is mediated through desires and aversions. That is to say, the money that a person is prepared to offer for a thing measures directly, not the satisfaction he will get from the thing, but-the intensity of his desire for it. This distinction, obvious when stated, has been somewhat obscured for English-speaking students by the employment of the term utility - which naturally carries an association with satisfaction - to represent intensity of desire. Thus, when one thing is desired by a person more keenly than another, it is said to possess a greater utility to that person. Several writers have endeavored to get rid of the confusion which this use of words generates by substituting "utility" in the above sense for some other term, such as "desirability". The term "desiredness" seems, however, to be preferable, because, since it cannot be taken to have any ethical implication, it is less ambiguous. I shall myself employ that term. Generally speaking, everybody prefers present pleasures or satisfactions of given magnitude to future pleasures or satisfactions of equal magnitude, even when the latter are perfectly certain to occur. But this preference for present pleasures does not - the idea is self-contradictory - imply that a present pleasure of given magnitude is any greater than a future pleasure of the same magnitude. It implies only that our telescopic faculty is defective, and that we, therefore, see future pleasures, as it were, on a diminished scale. That this is the right explanation is proved by the fact that exactly the same diminution is experienced when, apart from our tendency to forget ungratifying incidents, we contemplate the past. Our analysis also suggests that economic welfare could be increased by some rightly chosen degree of differentiation in favor of saving. Nobody, of course, holds that the State should force its citizens to act as though so much objective wealth now and in the future were of exactly equal importance. In view of the uncertainty of productive developments, to say nothing of the mortality of nations and eventually of the human race itself, this would not, even in the extremest theory, be sound policy. But there is wide agreement that the State should protect the interests of the future in some degree against the effects of our irrational discounting and of our preference for ourselves over our descendants. The whole movement for "conservation" in the United States is based on this conviction. It is the clear duty of Government, which is the trustee for unborn generations as well as for its present citizens, to watch over, and, if need be, by legislative enactment, to defend, the exhaustible natural resources of the country from rash and reckless spoliation. Plainly, if we assume adequate competence on the part of governments, there is a valid case for some artificial encouragement to investment, particularly to investments the return from which will only begin to appear after the lapse of many years. It must, however, be remembered that, so long as people are left free to decide for themselves how much work they will do, interference, by fiscal or any other means , with the way they employ the resources that their work yields to them may react to diminish the aggregate amount of this work and so of those resources.Comprehension Questions:

单选题The procurement department is in charge of ______.

单选题From Gates's mention of W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X we can infer that ______.

单选题______ of over 5% are attractive if the dollar really is going to stabilize.

单选题The main feature of a convention--a pattern of behavior that is customary, expected, and self-enforced--is that, out of a host of conceivable choices, only one is actually used. This fact also explains why conventions are needed: they resolve problems of indeterminacy in interactions that have multiple equilibria. Indeed, from a forma[ point of view, we may define a convention as an equilibrium that everyone expects in interactions that have more than one equilibrium. The economic significance of conventions is that they reduce transaction costs. Imagine the inconvenience if, whenever two vehicles approached one another, the drivers had to get out and negotiate which side of the road to take. Or consider the cost of having to switch freight from one type of railroad to another whenever a journey involves both a wide-gauge and a narrow-gauge railroad line. This was a common circumstance in the nineteenth century and not unknown in the late twentieth: until recently, Australia had different rail gauges in the states of South Wales and Victoria, forcing a mechanical switch for all trains bound between Sydney and Melbourne. Conventions are also a notable feature of legal contracts. People rely on standard leases, wills, purchasing agreements, construction contracts and the like, because it is less costly to fill in the blanks of a standard contract than to Create one from scratch. Even more important, such agreements are backed up by legal precedent, so the signatories have even greater confidence that, their terms are enforceable. We may discern two ways in which conventions become established. One is by central authority. Following the French Revolution, for example, it was decreed that horse-drawn carriages in Paris should keep to the right. The previous custom had been for carriages to keep left and for pedestrians to keep right, facing the oncoming traffic. Changing the custom was symbolic of the new order going on the left had become politically incorrect because it was identified with the privileged classes; going on the right was the habit of the common many and therefore-more "democratic." In Britain, by contrast there seems to have been no single defining event that gave rise to the dominant convention of left-handed driving. Rather, it grew up by local custom, spreading from one region to another. This is the second mechanism by which conventions become established: the gradual accretion of precedent. The two mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, of course. Society often converges on a convention first by an informal process of accretion; later it is codified into law to regulate exceptions. In many countries, rules of the road were not legislated until the nineteenth century, but by this time the law was merely reiterating what had already become established custom. The surprising fact is that until the end of the eighteenth century, the dominant convention was for horse-drawn carriages to keep to the left. This situation obtained in Great Britain, France, Sweden, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and parts of Italy. A chain of historical accidents--Napoleon adopting the new convention for his armies and imposing this convention in occupied countries; Portugal sharing a common border with occupied Spain; Austria, Hungary and Bohemian Czechoslovakia falling under German rule; Italy having elected a "modern" leader under a king--gradually tipped the balance.