单选题The ALSPAC report is the third in recent years to find few or no______ effects from consuming most types of seafood during pregnancy. A. adverse B. aggregate C. antagonistic D. animate

单选题{{B}}Passage 2{{/B}} "It was the beginning of a revolution in America and the world, a revolution that some have yet to acknowledge and many have yet to appreciate," says Harold Skramstad, president of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. 1776? No indeed. 1896, when Frank Duryea finally perfected the Duryea Motor Wagon. At its first airing, the contraption rolled less than 100 metres before the transmission froze up. But by the end of 1896 Duryea had sold 13 of them, thus giving birth to the American motor industry. That industry (whose roots, outside America, are usually attributed to tinkerings by Messrs Daimler and Benz in Germany) is being celebrated hugely over the coming months, culminating with a Great American Cruise in Detroit in June. "Our goal is to attract the greatest collection of antique and classic cars this nation has ever seen in one place at one time," says Mr. Skramstad modestly. Americans may indeed blame the car for almost everything that has happened to their country, and themselves, since 1896. The car has determined. The way they live. From cradle to grave, the car marks every rite of American passage. Home by car from the maternity ward; first driving licence (usually at the age of 16); first (backseat) sexual experience; first car of one's own (and the make of car is a prime determinant of social status, symbolic of everything a person is or does). In Las Vegas, and elsewhere, Americans can get married at drive-in chapels. They then buy, or lust after, a house with garages big enough for not one but two or three cars. This allocates more space to cars than to children. And when the time comes, they may lie in state at a drive-through funeral home, where you can pay your respects without pulling over. The way they shop. Main Street has been replaced by the strip mall and the shopping mall, concentrating consumer goods in an auto-friendly space. A large part of each shopping trip must now be spent, bags under chin, searching for the place where the car was left. (And another point: bags have annoyingly lost their carrying handles since shoppers ceased to be pedestrian) Since car-friendly living and shopping became the role, most built-up parts of America now look like every other part. There is simply no difference between a Burger Inn in California and one on the outskirts of Boston. The way they eat. A significant proportion of Americans' weekly meals are now consumed inside cars, sometimes while parked outside the (drive-by) eatery concerned, sometimes en route, which leads to painful spillages in laps, leading to overburdening of the legal system. Dozens of laws have been written to deal with car cases, ranging from traffic disputes to product liability. Drive-by shootings require a car, as do most getaways. The car is a great crime accessory; and it als0 causes the deaths of nearly 40,000 Americans every year. Personal finances. Before the age of the car, few people went into debt; no need to borrow money to buy a home. Now Americans tie themselves up with extended installment loans, and this in turn has spawned a whole financial industry. The wealth of the nation. By 1908, an estimated 485 different manufacturers were building cars in the United States. Employment grew nearly 100-fold in the industry during the first decade of the 20th century. When Henry Ford, in a stroke of genius, automated his production line he required a rush of new, unskilled labour, which he enticed by offering an unheard-of $ 5 a day in wages. Henceforth, workers could actually afford to buy what they built. And Americans never looked back. Today, the Big Three car manufacturers (Food, GM and Chrysler) generate more than $200 billion a year in business inside the United States. Directly and indirectly, the industry employs roughly one in seven workers. Every car job is reckoned to add $100,000 in goods and services to the economy, twice the national average. People occasionally suppose that the car is under attack as it enters its second century. Environmental regulators and transport planners (with their talk of car pools and subways) tend to give this impression. There are signs that personal computers may be replacing the sports car as the chief passion, and expense, of young men. But, in the end, nothing beats the idea of individual mobility. In a society that values freedom above all, the obvious way to celebrate a centenary is just to keep driving.

单选题In most American high schools, selling soft drinks is ______.

单选题 During rush hour, downtown streets are ______ with commuters.

单选题Biologists have Uascertained/U that specialized cells convert chemical energy into mechanical energy.

单选题It is possible for students to obtain advanced degrees in English while knowing little or nothing about traditional scholarly methods. The consequences of this neglect of traditional scholarship are particularly unfortunate for the study of women writers. If the canon—the list of authors whose works are most widely taught—is ever to include more women, scholars who do not know how to read early manuscripts, locate rare books, establish a sequence of editions, and so on are lacking in crucial tools for revising the canon. To address such concerns, an experimental, version of the traditional scholarly methods course was designed to raise students' consciousness about the usefulness of traditional learning for any modern critic or theorist. To minimize the artificial aspects of the conventional course, the usual procedure of assigning a large number of small problems drawn from the entire range of historical periods was abandoned, though this procedure has the obvious advantage of at least superficially familiarizing students with a wide range of reference sources. Instead students were engaged in a collective effort to do original work on a neglected eighteenth-century writer, Elizabeth Griffith, to give them an authentic experience of literary scholarship and to inspire them to take responsibility for the quality of their own work. Griffith's work presented a number of advantages for this particular pedagogical purpose. First, the body of extant scholarship on Griffith was so tiny that it could all be read in a day, thus students spent little time and effort mastering the literature and, had a clear field for their own discoveries. Griffith's play The Platonic Wife exists in three versions, enough to provide illustrations of editorial issues but not too many for beginning students to manage. In addition, because Griffith was successful in the eighteenth century, as her continued productivity and favorable reviews demonstrate, her exclusion from the canon and virtual disappearance from literary history also helped raise issues concerning the current canon. The range of Griffith's work meant that each student could become the world's leading authority on a particular Griffith text. For example, a student studying Griffith's Wife in the Right obtained a first edition of the play and studied it for some weeks. This student was suitably shocked and outraged to find its title transformed into A Wife in the Night in Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica. Such experiences, inevitable and common in working on a writer to whom so little attention has been paid, serve to vaccinate the student I hope for a lifetime against credulous use of reference sources.

单选题Young people's social environment has a ______ effect on their academic progress.

单选题This discovery of the New World is ______ to the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus.

单选题As women demonstrate a growing appetite for consumer tech products, retailers and manufacturers are still only beginning to cater to this potentially huge reservoir of customers. High-tech businesses and electronics retailers are changing store designs, increasing their marketing toward women, focusing on gadget accessories and boosting advertising in women's magazines--all in a pitch to get women to walk the aisles and walk out with cell phones, MP3 players and plasma televisions. To draw women in, stores have been turning down the music, changing the color schemes and adding staff trained to meet women's needs. Radio Shack has gussied up its gray and black decor with bright purple, orange and green at its newer stores. Aisles have been widened and the product arrangements redone to make the place look less like a cluttered electronics hardware store. The company also has put more women on the sales floor. "The store doesn't feel like a men's club anymore," said Charles Hodges, a spokesman for Radio Shack. "Now women can walk in and be helped by women just as knowledgeable as guys." Most technology manufacturers have few women among their top executives, and that translates into the kinds of products on the shelves and the way they are marketed, according to Quinlan, author of "Just Ask a Woman-cracking the Code of What Women Want and How They Buy". Few devices-iPods and Palm handheld computers are among the exceptions--tap into a woman's sense of style, she said. "Design is key-attractive, holdable, showable design." she said. Women often are swayed to buy a product for reasons far different than those that drive men. They will choose a gadget not because they want to be a pioneer but be-cause they and their friends have discovered the usefulness of the thing. "Where men like to be the only one with a product, women like to bring more of her friends into their find--they want to share the good news of what's working for them," Quinlan said. But friends are only one of the ways that women are discovering what's important to them when it comes to tech. There's also a growing number of outside influences--product-specific or trend articles in magazines that target women of all ages, for example. Recently, Radio Shack worked with Seventeen magazines--known for its fashion, beauty and relationship features for young women--on a story about MP3 players.

单选题ATIME 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 of preemies 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 preformed more than 800 of these operations and hopes to do an additional 1,000 before he retires. 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Another hazard was that bottles sometimes fell off the shelves because of ______ from above.

单选题Passage 1 Scientists now tend to agree that the noise level for potential hearing loss begins at about 7 decibels. Some of them are very concerned because normal daily life often exposes people to nois levels of about 70 decibels even inside their homes. Cities have always been noisy, but noise is nm spreading to areas that were quiet just a few years ago. Clearly, something must be done or noise will seriously and permanently maim the populatior Fortunately, the knowledge and methods to control noise already exist. As a matter of fact, this i one instance where the knowledge of control methods exceeds the knowledge about the effects o human life and on the environment. There are two common means for control. The first is reducing noise at its source, and th second is changing the sound path by distance or by shielding. The second approach is being used more often today as people become more aware of th danger of noise. New building codes require better sound insulation in homes and apartments. Mor and more towns are passing zoning ordinances that try to segregate noisy factories or airports fro~ residential areas. Sound-absorbent materials and construction designed to block sound paths ar slowly coming into use in offices and homes. New highways are being built to redirect traffic nois up and away from nearby areas. Aircraft are increasingly being required to use reduced powe flights around airports. There are many examples of available noise control methods that are not being used. Mor flexible building codes would permit the use of quieter kinds of plumbing pipes. Sound-absorbint materials can reduce the noise of motors and engines. Power generators can be quieted with baffles exhaust silencers, and sound absorbers. Truck tires can be made with quieter treads. In many cases the cost of building quieter machines is the same or only slightly higher than that of the current noisy ones. Even though the new equipment may cost more initially, it can prove more profitable in the long run. The new jumbo jets, for example, are quieter than the older ones, yet they are more powerful and carry twice as many passengers. All of these methods are only partial measures as noisy levels continue to rise. Most specialists in the field agree that much of the solution must come from eliminating some of the noise at its source, therefore saving through prevention the large costs of hearing loss.

单选题 "For all you know, I might have a tremendous burning talent," warns the heroine of Brief Encounter, as the camera pans on to a serenading lady cellist in a teashop trio. "Oh dear, no," comes the reply, "you're too sane and uncomplicated." For a place where talent rarely falls below combustion point, the Royal College of Music is good at not encouraging the cinema stereotype of what it means to be an artist. In fact, the college is too close to the profession it serves to be anything but a breeding ground of serious hard work: there's not time, and very little room for temperament. The proof of industry is quite audible on weekdays during term, when the whole building generates a comfortable din of uncoordinated noise, as pervasive as the English academic smell of polished and cooked cabbage that haunts the corridors. The overall impression is that the college has outgrown its premises as well as its sound-proofing, even though the building in Prince Consort Road has been extended twice. A hundred years ago, when the Royal College came into official existence, it was on a much smaller scale and housed in what is now the Royal College of Organists--a florid piece of 19th-century fantasy beside the Altert Hall. Most students come here straight from school, which is often at a younger age than the current director, Sir David Willcocks, would like, "Singers in particular we encourage to come later, because the voice doesn't really develop until 20 -23. But in practice we accept people before then, rather than see them go elsewhere. If you tell someone to come back in three years time, and he goes off and gets a good job, why should he then risk giving it up to become a student?" Willcocks likes to keep his students for as long as possible, and one of the major policy decisions taken since he came to the college in 1974 has been to increase the length of the basic performers course by a fourth year. "The only ones who could properly go into the profession after three years are wind players, because their standards are astonishingly high these days. Other- wise, my advice is usually to stay here for four years and then perhaps take a specialist course abroad. The most critical recommendation of all—for a student to abandon the idea of a professional performing career—is one that Willcocks rarely has to make. It's in the nature of a conservatoire that progress, or lack of it, is public knowledge; and, given some sensitivity to the competition, most students find their own level without having to be told, "You know when you' ye done well," said one battle-scarred soprano, "because nobody speaks to you." In fact the great majority do carry on with music after they leave the college, but not necessarily in the form they had expected. Conductors may end up repetiteurs in provincial opera houses; solo singers may be swept into the chorus; some are absorbed by arts administration or the BBC, and many become teachers. In all cases, even those who give up music altogether, Willcocks is insistent that they haven't failed: "Music is a discipline in itself, a training of the mind."

单选题The jurors came to a Udeadlock/U in the defendant's trial for murder.

单选题If ambition is to be well regarded, the rewards of ambition wealth, distinction, control over one"s destiny must be deemed worthy of the sacrifices made on ambition"s behalf. If the tradition of ambition is to have vitality, it must be widely shared; and it especially must be highly regarded by people who are themselves admired, the educated not least among them. In an odd way, however, it is the educated who have claimed to have give up on ambition as an ideal. What is odd is that they have perhaps most benefited from ambition—if not always their own then that of their parents and grandparents. There is heavy note of hypocrisy in this, a case of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped with the educated themselves riding on them. Certainly people do not seem less interested in success and its signs now than formerly. Summer homes, European travel, BMWs. The locations, place names and name brands may change, but such items do not seem less in demand today than a decade or two years ago. What has happened is that people cannot confess fully to their dreams, as easily and openly as once they could, lest they be thought pushing, acquisitive and vulgar. Instead, we are treated to fine hypocritical spectacles, which now more than ever seem in ample supply: the critic of American materialism with a Southampton summer home; the publisher of radical books who takes his meals in three-star restaurants; the journalist advocating participatory democracy in all phases of life, whose own children are enrolled in private schools. For such people and many more perhaps not so exceptional, the proper formulation is, "Succeed at all costs but avoid appearing ambitious." The attacks on ambition are many and come from various angles; its public defenders are few and unimpressive, where they are not extremely unattractive. As a result, the support for ambition as a healthy impulse, a quality to be admired and fixed in the mind of the young, is probably lower than it has ever been in the United States. This does not mean that ambition is at an end, that people no longer feel its stirrings and promptings, but only that, no longer openly honored, it is less openly underground, or made sly. Such, then, is the way things stand: on the left angry critics, on the right stupid supporters, and in the middle, as usual, the majority of earnest people trying to get on in life.

单选题In my twenties, I was______ to anxiety and depression, which I experienced as a depletion of my self-esteem.

单选题The none of students in the class likes the mistress, who is used to being______ of everything they do.(2002年清华大学考博试题)

单选题Being able to move gives animals many advantages, but it also generates its own demands. For any animal, ______ movement can be unhelpful or even dangerous. A. ransom B. retrieve C. random D. redeem

单选题Britain hopes of a gold medal in the Olympic Games suffered ______ yesterday, when Hunter failed to qualify during preliminary session. A. a severe set-back B. sharp set-back C. a severe blown-up D. sharp blown-up