单选题He is too young to be able to ______ between right and wrong.

单选题We simply can't compete with other companies______we improve our engine design and reduce the cost of production.(2014年厦门大学考博试题)

单选题Peter was seen crying when he came out of the office. We can deduce that he must have been punished.

单选题{{B}}Passage Four{{/B}} Engineering students are supposed to be examples of practicality and rationality, but when it comes to my college education I am an idealist and a fool. In high school I wanted to be an electrical engineer and, of Course, any sensible student with my aims would have chosen a college with a large engineering department, famous reputation and lots of good labs and research equipment. But that's not what I did. I chose to study engineering at a small liberal-arts university that doesn't even offer a major in electrical engineering. Obviously, this was not a practical choice; I came here for more noble reasons. I wanted a broad education that would provide me with flexibility and a value system to guide me in my career. I wanted to open my eyes and expand my vision by interacting with people who weren't studying science or engineering. My parents, teachers and other adults praised me for such a sensible choice. They told me I was wise and mature beyond my 18 years, and I believed them. I headed off to college, feeling sure I was going to have an advantage over those students who went to big engineering "factories" where they didn't care if you had values or were flexible. I was going to be a complete engineer: technical genius and sensitive humanist all in one. Now I'm not so sure. Somewhere along the way my noble ideals crashed into reality, as all noble ideals eventually do. After three years of struggling to balance math, physics and engineering courses with liberal arts courses, I have learned there are reasons why few engineering students try to reconcile engineering with liberal-arts courses in college. The reality that has blocked my path to become the typical successful student is that engineering and the liberal arts simply don't mix as easily as I assumed in high school. Individually they shape a person in very different ways; together they threaten to confuse. The struggle to reconcile the two fields of study is difficult.

单选题In Germany, the industrial giants Daimler Chrysler and Siemens recently ______ their unions into signing contracts that lengthen work hours without increasing pay.

单选题A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world's best, its workers the most skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed. It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith.(Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea's LG Electronics in July.)Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America's machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty. All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America's industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas. How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride. "American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learnt to be more quick-witted," according to Richard Cavanagh, executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Management, "It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity," says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as " a golden age of business management in the United States".

单选题The archaic phrase, "I demand satisfaction" ______.

单选题"Your eyes are two pools that twinkle like stars in the sky." These sweet things are traditionally best sent in feather-inked script on fine, perfumed parchment. Nowadays, though, more and more lovers are using e-mail or cell phone short message services (SMS) to say a few nice words to each other. The result: a new culture of love-letter writing has evolved and is rewriting the rules in how we express our love. Make no mistake: in many cases the love e-mail messages significantly resemble their aromatic predecessors. The verbal imagery has hardly changed. SMS messages, however, have necessitated the development of a new, shorter form of love talk. Experts believe, in fact, that far more people now carry out sweet talk in cyberspace than in the time before e-mail and short messaging came along. When people communicate over e-mail or short messages, everything is much more relaxed, less serious, and this helps the sweet words flow. Nicola Doering, a media researcher at the Technical University of Ilmenau in Thueringen, Germany, emphasizes that for many people contact over e-mail or SMS is simpler: "The language is a different one, here than in traditional letters; people tend to write more like they speak." This means that a message writer might not have to agonize over every word, as is often expected with traditional love letters. This is obviously encouraging for many people. For longer, particularly romantic love letters, e-mail writer also reach back into the language of poetry, "Your calf-blue eyes" is typical for the kind of phrasings found in e-mail love letters. At least one traditional symbol between lovers has made a striking comeback. Even in the love letters of the 19th century, one often found the letter X as a symbol of a kiss. Many paper love letters would have three Xs at the bottom as a closing. And this symbol is often used today between lovers in their e-mail messages. In spite of all the technological advancement that e-mail represents, classic love letters on paper still have a special meaning, the experts say. Ink on paper simply affects many people more strongly than lines on a computer screen. It appears more serious, more binding, as if written for all eternity. Sometimes people want to have something to touch, a letter that you can really hold in your hand.

单选题Consider the universal cannibalism of the sea, all of whose creatures ______ one another.

单选题The money most American firms put in work force training mainly goes on ______.

单选题To avoid an oil shortage more machines must ______ solar energy.

单选题There is widespread belief that the emergence of giant industries has been accompanied by an equivalent surge in industrial research. A recent study of important inventions made since the turn of the century reveals that more than half were the product of individual inventors working alone, independent of organized industrial research. While industrial laboratories contributed such important products as nylon and transistors, independent inventors developed air conditioning, the automatic transmission, the jet engine, the helicopter, insulin, and streptomycin. Still other inventions, such as stainless steel, television, silicones, and Plexiglas were developed through the combined efforts of individuals and laboratory teams. Despite these finding, we are urged to support monopolistic power on the grounds that such power creates an environment supportive of innovation. We are told that the independent inventor, along with the small firm, cannot afford to undertake the important research needed to improve our standard of living while protecting our diminishing resources; that only the giant corporation or conglomerate, with its prodigious assets, can afford the kind of expenditures that produce the technological advances vital to economic progress. But when we examine expenditures for research, we find that of the more than $35 billion spent each year in this country, almost two-thirds is spent by the federal government. More than half of this government expenditure is funneled into military research and product development, accounting for the enormous increase in spending in such industries as nuclear energy, aircraft, missiles, and electronics. There are those who consider it questionable that these defense-linked research projects will either improve our standard of living or do much to protect our diminishing resources. Recent history has demonstrated that we may have to alter our longstanding conception of the process actuated by competition. The price variable, once perceived as the dominant aspect of the process, is now subordinate to the competition of the new product, the new business structure, and the new technology. While it can be assumed that in a highly competitive industry not dominated by single corporation, investment in innovation—a risky and expensive budget item—might meet resistance from management and stockholders concerned about cost-cutting, efficient organization, and large advertising budgets, it would be an egregious error to equate the monopolistic producer with bountiful expenditures on research. Large-scale enterprises tend to operate more comfortably in stable and secure circumstances, and their managerial bureaucracies tend to promote the status quo and resist the threat implicit in change. Moreover, in some cases, industrial giants faced with little or no competition seek to avoid the capital loss resulting from obsolescence by deliberately obstructing technological progress. By contrast, small firms undeterred by large investments in plant and capital equipment often aggressively pursue new techniques and new products, investing in innovation in order to expand their market shares. The conglomerates are not, however, completely except from strong competitive pressures. There are instances in which they too must compete with another industrial Goliath, and then their weapons may include large expenditures for innovation.

单选题In the service of knowledge, scientists also train the most skilled component of the work force ______ to the employers.

单选题The upshot of all this was that travelling had become Uprecarious/U.

单选题A thorough study of biology requires ______ with the properties of trees and plants, and the habit of birds and beasts. A. acquisition B. discrimination C. curiosity D. familiarity

单选题At first I guessed it was an airplane, but I soon changed my mind because it remained {{U}}static{{/U}} instead of moving like a plane.

单选题In applied investigation, ______.