单选题A new technological process may be employed to tap this abundant supply directly.

单选题There is little learning involved when one is Ureprimanded/U two or three months after the deed.

单选题The word "unimpeachable" in the last paragraph can be replaced by ______.

单选题The main objective reason is that some developed countries ______ from the basic principle of anti-dumping and take the Anti-dumping Law as a tool for trade protection. A. derive B. deviate C. refrain D. exempt

单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following passage. Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard's chief executive, came out fighting on November 14th. In a conference call with analysts, she announced better-than-expected quarterly results, even though profits were down. Ms Fiorina also reiterated why she believes her $24 billion plan to acquire Compaq is the best way forward for HP, despite objections by Hewlett and Packard family members. Last week Walter Hewlett, whose father cofounded the company, expressed concern that the merger would increase HP's exposure to the shrinking PC market and would distract managers from the more important task of navigating through the recession. There are two ways to defend the deal. One is to point out its advantages, which is what Ms Fiorina did this week. Merging with Compaq, she said, would enable HP to reach its goals faster than it could on its own. The deal would improve HP's position in key markets such as storage and high-end computing, as well as the economics of its PC business. It would double the size of HP's sales force and broaden its customer base, providing more potential clients for its services and consulting arms. It would improve eashflow, margins and efficiency by adding " breadth and depth" to HP. "Having spent the last several months planning the integration of these two companies, we are even more convinced of the power of this combination," Ms Fiorina concluded. It sounds too good to be true, and it almost certainly is. But the other way to defend the deal is to point out that, even if it was a bad idea to start with, abandoning it could be even worse--a view that, unsurprisingly, Ms Fiorina chose not to advance, but is being quietly put forward by the deal's supporters. Scrapping the merger would he extremely painful for a number of reasons. Since the executive teams of both firms have committed themselves to the deal, they would be utterly discredited if it fell apart, and would probably have to go. Under the terms of the merger agreement, HP might have to pay Compaq as much as $675m if it backed out. The two firms would be considerably weakened; they would also be rivals again, despite having shared confidential technical and marketing information with each other over the past few months. In short, it would all be horribly messy. What can be done to save the deal? Part of the problem is that HP has no plan B. "They need a brand-re-covery effort immediately," says one industry analyst. HP must give the impression that it is strong and vital, rather than desperate, and that its future is not dependent on the deal going forward. That could make the merger look more attractive and bring investors back on board. This week's results will certainly help. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which owns just over one-tenth of HP's shares, will decide whether to back the merger in the next few weeks, and HP's shareholders are to vote on it early next year. The more credible HP's plan B, the less likely it is that it will be needed.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} Forget what Virginia Woolf said about what a writer needs--a room of one's own. The writer she has in mind wasn't at work on a novel in cyberspaee, one with multiple hypertexts, animated graphics and downloads of trance, charming music. For that you also need graphic interfaces, Real Player and maybe even a computer laboratory at Brown University. That was where Mark Amerika--his legally adopted name; don't ask him about his birth name--composed much of his novel Gramatron. But Grammatron isn't just a story. It's an online narrative (gramatron. com) that uses the capabilities of cyberspace to tie the conventional story line into complicated knots. In the four years it took to produce-it was completed in 1997-each new advance in computer software became another potential story device. "I became sort of dependent on the industry," jokes Amerika, who is also the author of two novels printed on paper. "That's unusual for a writer, because if you just write on paper the 'technology' is pretty stable." Nothing about Gramatron is stable. At its center, if there is one, is Abe Golam, the inventor of nanograph a quasi mystical computer code that some unmystical corporations are itching to acquire. For much of the story, Abe wanders through Prague-23, a virtual "city" in cyberspace where visitors indulge in fantasy encounters and virtual sex, which can get fairly graphic. The reader wanders too, because most of Gramatron's 1,000-plus text screens contain several passages in hypertext. To reach the next screen just double-click. But each of those hypertexts is a trapdoor that can plunge you down a different pathway of the story. Choose one and you drop into a corporate-strategy memo. Choose another and there's a XXX-rated sexual rant. The st0ry you read is in some sense file story you make. Amerika teaches digital art at the University of Colorado, where his students develop works that straddle the lines between art, film and literature. "I tell them not to get caught up in mere plot," he says. Some avant-garde writers--Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino-have also experimented with novels that wander out of their author's control. "But what makes the Net so exciting," says Amerika, "is that you can add sound, randomly generated links, 3-D modeling, animation." That room of one's own is turning into a fun house.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} In the relationship of education to business we observe today a fine state of paradox. On the one hand, the emphasis which most business places upon a college degree is so great that one can almost visualize the time when even the office boy will have his baccalaureate. On the other hand, we seem to preserve the belief that some deep intellectual chasm separates the businessman from other products of the university system. The notion that business people are quite the Philistines sounds absurd. For some reason, we tend to characterize vocations by stereotypes, none too flattering but nonetheless deeply imbedded in the national conscience. In the cast of characters the businessman comes on stage as a crass and uncouth person. It is not a pleasant conception and no more truthful or less unpleasant than our other stereotypes. Business is made up of people with all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of motivations, and all kinds of tastes, just as in any other form of human endeavour. Businessmen are not ambulatory balance' sheets and profit statements, but perfectly normal human beings, subject to whatever strengths, frailties, and limitations characterize man on the earth. They. are people grouped together in organizations designed to complement the weakness of one with strength of another, tempering the exuberance of the young with the caution of the more mature, the poetic soarings of one mind with the counting house realism of another. Any disfigurement which society may suffer will come from man himself, not from the particular vocation to which he devotes his time. Any group of people necessarily represents an approach to a common denominator, and it is probably tree that even individually they tend to conform somewhat to the general pattern. Many have pointed out the danger of engulfing our original thinkers in a tide of mediocrity. Conformity is not any more prevalent or any more exacting in the business field than it is in any other. It is a characteristic of all organizations of whatever nature. The fact is the large business unit provides greater opportunities for individuality and requires less in the way of conformity than other institutions of comparable size—the government, or the academic world, or certainly the military.

单选题Information technology that helps doctors and patients make decisions has been around for a long time. Crude online tools like WebMD get millions of visitors a day. But Watson is a different beast. According to IBM, it can digest information and make recommendations much more quickly, and more intelligently, than perhaps any machine before it—processing up to 60 million pages of text per second, even when that text is in the form of plain old prose, or what scientists call "natural language." That"s no small thing, because something like 80 percent of all information is "unstructured." In medicine, it consists of physician notes dictated into medical records, long-winded sentences published in academic journals, and raw numbers stored online by public-health departments. At least in theory, Watson can make sense of it all. It can sit in on patient examinations, silently listening. And over time, it can learn and get better at figuring out medical problems and ways of treating them the more it interacts with real cases. Watson even has the ability to convey doubt. When it makes diagnoses and recommends treatments, it usually issues a series of possibilities, each with its own level of confidence attached. Medicine has never before had a tool quite like this. And at an unofficial coming-out party in Las Vegas last year, during the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, more than 1,000 professionals packed a large hotel conference hall, and an overflow room nearby, to hear a presentation by Marty Kohn, an emergency-room physician and a clinical leader of the IBM team training Watson for health care. Standing before a video screen that dwarfed his large frame, Kohn described in his husky voice how Watson could be a game changer—not just in highly specialized fields like oncology but also in primary care, given that all doctors can make mistakes that lead to costly, sometimes dangerous, treatment errors. Drawing on his own clinical experience and on academic studies, Kohn explained that about one-third of these errors appear to be products of misdiagnosis, one cause of which is "anchoring bias": human beings" tendency to rely too heavily on a single piece of information. This happens all the time in doctors" offices, clinics, and emergency rooms. A physician hears about two or three symptoms, seizes on a diagnosis consistent with those, and subconsciously discounts evidence that points to something else. Or a physician hits upon the right diagnosis, but fails to realize that it"s incomplete, and ends up treating just one condition when the patient is, in fact, suffering from several. Tools like Watson are less prone to those failings. As such, Kohn believes, they may eventually become as ubiquitous in doctors" offices as the stethoscope. "Watson fills in for some human limitations," Kohn told me in an interview. "Studies show that humans are good at taking a relatively limited list of possibilities and using that list, but are far less adept at using huge volumes of information. That"s where Watson shines; taking a huge list of information and winnowing it down."

单选题It can be inferred from the article that the majorty of tropical forests______.

单选题Hardly ______ when a loud explosion was heard.

单选题In the days immediately following hurricane Andrew's deadly visit to South Florida, Allstate Insurance hastily dispatched more than 2,000 extra claim adjusters to the devastated area to assist the 200 stationed there. Many of the reserves arrived in convoys of motor homes. Others flew in from as far away as Alaska and California. Since the storm had knocked out telephone lines, Allstate rushed to set up its own communications system. Allstate expects to pay out 1.2 billion to cover more than 121,000 damage claims as a result of Andrew. All told, U.S. property and casualty insurers have been hit with more than $8 billion in Andrew-related claims, making the hurricane the most costly single calamity to strike the industry since the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906(cost 6 billion, after inflation). With claims continuing to pour in, Andrew threatens to take a painful toll on the already battered property — casualty insurance industry and its 100 million policy-holders. The final bill, analysts predict, is likely to top 10 billion. While most well-capitalized insurers are expected to weather the storm, less anchored firms are in danger of being blown away, leaving U.S. consumers stuck with the tab. Says Sean Mooney, senior researcher at the Insurance Information Institute: "It will take years before the industry digs itself out from the wreckage left by Andrew. Some(companies)will be buried by it." Hurricane Andrew is the latest in a string of mishaps to plague the American insurance industry this year. In April an overflowing Chicago River flooded the city's downtown district, costing insurers $300 million in claims. A month later, Los Angeles was rocked by the worst civilian riot in the U.S. since the Civil War. The insurance toll: $1 billion. Then came a series of major hailstorms in Texas, Florida and Kansas. They cost insurers a combined $700 million. And two weeks after Andrew, another lethal hurricane, Iniki, smashed into Hawaii, causing $1.4 billion in damages. In all, property and casualty insurers have paid out a record 13 billion in claims so far this year, far surpassing the previous high of $7.6 billion in 1989, the year of Hurricane Hugo and California's Bay Area earthquake. Just as in that year, when those catastrophes were followed by substantial increases in insurance premiums, insurers are already lobbying for rate relief.

单选题Without a sensible sex education all kinds of strange and fantastic ideas will ______ .

单选题Linguists have understood for decades that language and thought are closely related. Humans construct reality using thought and express these thoughts through the use of language. Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorl are credited with developing the most relevant explanation outlining the relationship between thought and language, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The hypothesis consists of two parts, linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism. Supporters of linguistic relativity assume that culture is shaped by language. Terwilliger defines linguistic determinism as the process by which "the functions of one's mind are determined by the nature of the language which one speaks." In simpler terms, the thoughts that we construct are based upon the language that we speak and the words that we use. In its strongest sense, linguistic determinism can be interpreted as meaning that language determines thought. In its weakest sense, language partially influences thought. Whorl was careful to avoid authoritative statements which would permanently commit him to particular position. Because of the broad nature of his statements, it is difficult to distinguish exactly to what extent Whorf believes that language determines thought. Heated debate among modern linguists demonstrates that disagreement exists about the accuracy and correctness of Whorf's studies and of the actual level of influence of language on thought processes. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis essentially consists of two distinct statements connecting the relation of thought and language. Whorf believes that humans may be able to think only about objects, processes, and conditions that have language associated with them. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis also explains the relationship between different languages (French, English, German, Chinese, and so on) and thought. Whorl demonstrated that culture is largely determined by language. Different cultures perceive the world in different ways. Culturally essential objects, conditions and processes usually are defined by a plethora of words, while things that cultures perceive as unimportant are usually assigned one or two words. Whorf developed this theory while studying the Hopi Indian tribe. Whorl was amazed that the Hopi language has no words for past, present, and future. The Hopi have only one word for flying objects. A dragonfly, an airplane, and a pilot are defined using the same word. Whorl questioned whether or not the Hopi view the world differently than western peoples. After further interpretation and analysis he concluded that the Hopi have a sense for the continuum of time despite having no words to specifically describe past, present, and future. It is commonly believed that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis possesses some truth, but the extent to which it is applicable to all situations is questioned. Linguists generally sup port a "strong" or a "weak" interpretation. Linguists who study the hypothesis tend to cite examples that support their beliefs but are unable or unwilling to refute the opposing arguments. Examples exist that strengthen the arguments of everyone who studies the hypothesis. Nobody has gained significant ground in proving or refuting the hypothesis because the definitions of Sapir and Whorl are very vague and incomplete, leaving room for a significant amount of interpretation.

单选题In ______, the experiment was more difficult than we had imagined.

单选题Communication orally involves more than reading or talking: gesture, posture, movements may all be ______to it.(2002年10月中国科学院考博试题)

单选题And researchers say that like those literary romantics Romeo and Juliet, they may be blind to the consequences of their quests for an idealized mate who serves their every physical and emotional need. Nearly 19 in 20 never-married respondents to a national survey agree that "when you marry you want your spouse to be your soul mate, first and foremost", according to the State of Our Unions: 2001 study released Wednesday by Rutgers University. David Popenoe, a Rutgers sociologist and one of the study"s authors, said that view might spell doom for marriages. "It really provides a very unrealistic view of what marriage really is," Popenoe said. "The standard becomes so high, it"s not easy to bail out if you didn"t find a soul mate." The survey points to a fundamental dilemma in which younger people want more from the institution of marriage while they seemingly are unwilling to make the necessary commitments. The survey also suggests that some respondents expect too much from a spouse, including the kind of emotional support rendered by same-sex friends. The authors of the study also suggest that the generation that was polled may more quickly leave a margin because of infidelity than past generations. Popenoe said the poll, conducted by the Gallup organization, is the first of its kind to concentrate on people in their 20s. A total of 1,003 married and single young adults nationwide were interviewed by telephone between January and March. The margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points. Respondents said they eventually want to get married, realize it"s a lot of work and think there are too many divorces. They believe there is one right person for them out there somewhere and think their own marriages won"t end in divorce. Since the poll is the first of its kind, researchers say it is impossible to say if expectations about marriage are changing or static. But scholars say the search for soul mates has increased over the last generation--and the last century--as marriage has become an institution centering on romance rather than utility. "one hundred years ago, people married for financial reasons, for tying families together, they married for political reasons," said John DeLamater, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin. "And most people had children." Those conditions are no longer the case for young adults like David Asher, a 24-year-old waiter in a Trenton cafe who has been in a relationship for about two years. He wants to wait to make sure he"s ready to exchange vows. "I know a lot of it has to do with financial reasons," he said. "Maybe if you"re going to have children, marriage is the best bet." But the main reason for matrimony: "If you"re in love with someone, it"s sort of like promising to them you are in love." "That"s all well and good," said Heather Helms-Erikson, an assistant professor of human development and family studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "But passion--partly in endorphin- caused physiological phenomenon--has been known to diminish in time."