单选题I"m afraid that your daughter has failed to get through her mid-term exams. ______

单选题Where Did All the Ships Go? The Bermuda Triangle is one (1) the greatest mysteries of the sea. In this triangular area between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda in Atlantic, ships and airplanes (2) to disappear more often than in (3) parts of the ocean. And they do so (4) leaving any sign of all accident or any dead bodies. It is (5) that Christopher Columbus was the first person to record strange happenings in the area. His compass stopped working, a flame came down from the sky, and a wave 100 to 200 feet high carried his ship about a mile away. The most famous disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle was the US Naval Air Flight 19. (6) December 5, 1945, five bomber planes carrying 14 men. (7) on a training mission from the Florida coast. Later that day, all communications with Flight 19 were lost. They just disappeared without a trace. The next morning, 242 planes and 19 ships took part in the largest air-sea search in history. But they found nothing. Some people blame the disappearances (8) supernatural forces. It is suggested the(9) ships and planes were either transported to other times and places, kidnapped by aliens (10) attacked by sea creatures. There are (11) natural explanations, though. The US Navy says that the Bermuda triangle is one of two places on earth (12) a magnetic compass points towards true north (13) magnetic north. (14) planes and ships can lose their way if they don't make adjustments. The area also has changing weather and is known (15) its high waves. Storms can turn up suddenly and destroy a plane or ship. Fast currents could then sweep away any trace of an accident. Bermuda Triangle 百慕大三角区 Florida 4佛罗里达(美国的一个放) Pueto Rico波多黎各 Compass n.罗盘,指南针 supernatural adj. 超自然 kidnap v. 绑架 alien n.外星人 magnetic adj.有磁性的 trace n. 痕迹

单选题We almost ran into a Rolls-Royce that pulled out in front of us without signaling.

单选题 下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题。请根据短文内容，为每题确定1个最佳选项。{{B}}第一篇{{/B}} {{B}} Is the Tie a Necessity?{{/B}} Ties, or neckties, have been a symbol of politeness and elegance in Britain for centuries. But the casual Prime Minister Tony, Blair has problems with them. Reports suggest that even the civil servants may stop wearing ties. So, are the famously formal British really going to abandon the neckties? Maybe. Last week, the UK's Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull openly welcomed a tieless era. He hinted that civil servants would soon be free of the costliest 12 inches of fabric that most men ever buy in their lives. In fact, Blair showed this attitude when he had his first guests to a cocktail party. Many of them were celebrities (知名人士) without ties, which would have been unimaginable even in the recent past. For some more conservative British, the tie is a must for proper appearance. Earlier, Labor leader Jim Callaghan said he would have died rather than have his children seen in public without a tie. For people like Callaghan, the tie was a sign of being complete, of showing respect. Men were supposed to wear a tie when going to church, to work in the office, to a party - almost every social occasion. But today, people have begun to accept a casual style even for formal occasions. The origin of the tie is tricky. It started as something called simply a "band". The term could mean anything around a man's neck. It appeared in finer ways in the 1630s. Frenchmen showed a love of this particular fashion statement. Their neckwear (颈饰) impressed Charles II, the king of England who was exiled (流放) to France at that time. When he returned to England in 1660, he brought this new fashion item along with him. It wasn't, however, until the late 18th century that fancy young men introduced a more colorful, flowing piece of cloth that eventually became known as the tie. Then, clubs, military institutions and schools began to use colored and patterned ties to indicate the wearer's membership in the late 19th century. After that, the tie became a necessary item of clothing for British gentlemen. But now, even gentlemen are getting tired of ties. Anyway, the day feels a bit easier when you wake up without having to decide which tie suits you and your mood.

单选题The U.S. government has planned to ____ updating public transport systems.

单选题Medicine depends on other fields for basic information, {{U}}particularly{{/U}} some of their specialized branches. A. conventionally B. obviously C. especially D. inevitably

单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}} {{B}} Nuclear Power and Its Danger{{/B}} Nuclear power's danger to health, safety, and even life itself can be summed up in one word: radiation. Nuclear radiation has a certain mystery, about it, partly because it cannot be detected by human senses. It can't be seen or heard, or touched, or tasted, even though it may be all around us. There are other things like that. For example, radio waves are all around us but we can't detect them, sense them, without a radio receiver. Similarly, we can't sense radioactivity without a radiation detector. But unlike common radio waves, nuclear radiation is not harmless to human beings and other living things. At very high levels, radiation can kill an animal or human being outright by killing masses of cells in vital organs. But even the lowest level of radiation can do serious damage. There is no level of radiation that is completely safe. If the radiation does not hit anything important, the damage may not be significant. This is the case when only a few cells are hit, and if they are killed outright. Your body will replace the dead cells with healthy ones. But if the few cells are only damaged, and if they reproduce themselves, you may be in trouble. They reproduce themselves in a deformed way. They can grow into cancer. Sometimes this does not show up for many years. This is another reason for some of the mystery about nuclear radiation. Serious damage can be done without the victim being aware at the time that damage has occurred. A person can be irradiated and feel fine, then die of cancer five, ten, or twenty years later as a result. Or a child can be born weak or liable to serious illness as result of radiation absorbed by its grandparents. Radiation can hurt us. We must know the truth.

单选题The doctor said that I had to eliminate alcohol.

单选题The company issues an annual report every March.

单选题Disney's Own Iron Man Finally, Snow White can ditch those seven dwarfs for some tough guys—Spider - Man, Iron Man and the X - Men as Disney announced a $ 4 billion deal to acquire Marvel Comics. But Disnev's princesses can live on in their fantasy world without fear of any of Marvel's 5,000 tough characters, for they'll coexist peacefully. Bob Iger, who began his tenure as Disney CEO with the acquisition of Pixar, knows his way around the world of animation. "We believe that adding Marvel to Disney's unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long - term growth and value creation," he said in announcing the transaction. Unlike some of his counterparts—Viacom's Sumner Redstone and News Corp's Rupert Murdoch—Iger gets along with his colleagues and makes a point of delegating authority. And in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Michael Eisner, Iger has kept a low profile. Yet he has reaffirmed Disney's legacy in animation with some of the boldest dealmaking in Hollywood in the Dast decade. Drawing Pixar into the Walt Disney Co. required rewriting the Disney management script. Disney had been distributor for Pixar's productions, including such classics as Toy Story and Finding Nemo. But Eisner and Pixar founder Steve Jobs clashed like superheroes with super egos over the riches that both companies earned from their mutually rewarding arrangement. But in 2006, barely in his new job a year, Iger put an end to the child's play. He orchestrated the $ 7.4 billion Durchase of Pixar, which had quickly developed into the hottest hand in animation. So far, it's all been a Hollywood ending. Iger's first smart post - Pixar move was to install animator John Lasseter, the creative maestro behind the surging animation studio, as the chiefcreative of the combined Disney/Pixar studios. The four Pixar releases since the Disney deal have grossed $ 2 billion in worldwide ticket sales. In addition to the box - office bonanza, the acquisition also bolstered Disney's massive merchandise and theme- park businesses. Analysis are already gushing over Iger's acquisition of Marvel Comics. "Overall. we think Marvel's library and brands are a solid strategic fit for Disney," Anthony J. DiClemente. of Barclays Capital. "Disney should be able to leverage its global reach, execution, and distribution capabilities to grow Marvel's brands and business opportunities. /

单选题The river widens considerably as it begins to turn west.

单选题The example was fundamental to the argument.A. impressiveB. publicC. essentialD. slight

单选题{{B}}第二篇{{/B}} A Tale of Scottish Rural Life Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (1932) was voted "the best Scottish novel of all time" by Scottish's reading public in 2005．Once considered shocking for its frank description of aspects of the lives of Scotland's poor rural farmers, it has been adapted for stage, film, TV and radio in recent decades. The novel is set on the fictional estate of Kinraddie, in the farming country of the Scottish northwest in the years up to and beyond World War I. At its heart is the story of Chris, who is both part of the community and a little outside it. Grassic Gibbon gives us the most detailed and intimate account of the life of his heroine. We watch her grow through a childhood dominated by her cruel but hard-working father; experience tragedy (her mother's suicide and murder of her twin children ) ; and learn about her feelings as she grows into woman. We see her marry, lose her husband, then marry again. Chris has seemed so convincing a figure to some female readers that they cannot believe that she is the creation of a man. But it would be misleading to suggest that this book is just about Chris. It is truly a novel of a place and its people. Its opening section tells of Kinraddie's long history, in a language that imitates the place's changing patterns of speech and writing. The story itself is amazingly null of characters and incidents. It is told from Chris' point of view but also from that of the gossiping community, a community where everybody knows everybody else's business and nothing is ever forgotten. Sunset. Song has a social theme too. It is concerned with what Grassic Gibbon perceives as the destruction of traditional Scottish rural life first by modernization and then by World War I, Gibbon tried hard to show how certain characters resist the war. Despite this, the war takes the young men away, a number of them to their deaths. In particular it takes away Chris' husband, Evan Tavendale. The war finally kills Evan, but not in the way his widow is told. In fact, the Germans aren't responsible for his death, but his own side. He is shot because he is said to have run away from a battle. If the novel is about the end of one way of life it also looks ahead, It is a "Sunset Song" but is concerned too with the new Kinraddie, indeed of the new European world. Grassic Gibbon went on to publish two other novels about the place that continue its story. 注释： [1] Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (1932) was voted "the best Scottish novel of all time" by Scottish's reading public in 2005．Lewis Grassic Gibbon 《日落歌》(1932年在2005 被苏格兰读书界投票为“历来最佳的小说”。 [2] Chris has seemed so convincing a figure to some female readers that they cannot believe that she is the creation of a man. 在一些女读者看来，Chris这个人物写得非常令人信服，因此难以相信她是由一个男人创作出来的。

单选题Fridge The fridge is considered a necessity. It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food first appeared with the label: "store in the refrigerator." In my fridgeless Fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthily. The milkman came daily, the grocer, the butcher (肉商), the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times a week. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and surplus (剩余的) bread and milk became all kinks of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and we were never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on, food deliveries have ceases, fresh vegetables are almost unobtainable in the country. The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. A vast way of well-tried techniques already existed—natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling... What refrigeration did promote was marketing—marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the glode in search of search of a good price. Consequently, most of the world's fridges are to be round, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the wealthy countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically amost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-cooled space inside an artificially-heated house—while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charg. The fridge's effect upon the environment has been evident, while its contribution to human happiness has been insignificant. If you don't believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cabinet and turn off your fridge next winter. You may miss the hamburgers (汉堡包), but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum.

单选题 {{B}}Why is the Native Language Learnt So Well{{/B}} How does it happen that children learn their mother tongue so well? When we compare them with adults learning a foreign language, we often find this interesting fact. A little child without knowledge or experience often succeeds in a complete mastery of the language. A grown-up person with fully developed mental powers, in most case, may end up with a faulty and inexact command. What accounts for this difference? Despite other explanations, the real answer in my opinion lies partly in the child himself, partly in the behavior of the people around him. In the first place, the time of learning the mother tongue is the most favorable of all, namely, the first years of life. A child hears it spoken from morning till night and, what is more important, always in its genuine form, with the right pronunciation, right intonation, fight use of words and fight structure. He drinks in all the words and expressions, which come to him in a flash, ever-bubbling spring. There is no resistance: there is perfect assimilation. Then the child has, as it were, private lessons all the year round, while an adult language-student has each week a limited number of hours, which he generally shares with others. The child has another advantage: he hears the language in all possible situations, always accompanied by the fight kind of gestures and facial expressions. Here there is nothing unnatural, such as is often found in language lessons in schools, when one talks about ice and snow in June or scorching heat in January. And what a child hears is generally what immediately interests him. Again and again, when his attempts at speech are successful, his desires are understood and fulfilled. Finally, though a child's "teachers" may not have been trained in language teaching, their relations with him are always close and personal. They take great pains to make their lessons easy.

单选题The policemen acted quickly because lives were {{U}}at stake{{/U}}.

单选题I was astonished at the news of his escape.

单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}} {{B}}Milosevic' s Death{{/B}} Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was found dead last Saturday in his cell at the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The 64-year-old had been on trial there since February 2002. Born in provincial Pozarevac in 1941, he was the second son of a priest and a school teacher. Both of his parents died when he was still a young adult. The young Milosevic was "untypical", says Slavoljub Djukic, his unofficial biographer. He was "not interested in sports, avoided excursions and used to come to school dressed in the old-fashioned way - white shirt and tie." One of his old friends said, he could "imagine him as a station-master or punctilious civil servant". Indeed that is exactly what he might have become, had he not married Mira. She was widely believed to be his driving force. At university and beyond he did well. He worked for various firms and was a communist party member. By 1986 he was head of Serbia's Central Committer. But still he had not yet really been noticed. It was Kosovo that gave him his chance. An autonomous province of Serbia, Kosovo was home to an Albanian majority and a Serbian minority. In 1989, he was sent there to calm fears of Serbians who felt they were discriminated against. But instead he played the nationalist card and became their champion. In so doing, he changed into a ruthless and determined man. At home with Mira he plotted the downfall of his political enemies. Conspiring with the director of Serbian TV, he mounted a modern media campaign which aimed to get him the most power in the country. He was elected Serbian president in 1990. In 1997, he became president of Yugoslavia. The rest of the story is well-known: his nationalist card caused Yugoslavia's other ethnic groups to fight for their own rights, power and lands. Yugoslavia broke up when four of the six republics declared independence in 1991. War started and lasted for years and millions died. Then Western countries intervened. NATO bombed Yugoslavia, and he eventually stepped down as state leader in 2000. Soon after this, Serbia's new government, led by Zoran Djindjic, arrested him and sent him to face justice at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in the Hague.

单选题Mr. Henley has accelerated his sale of shares over the past year.

单选题Tourism People travel for a lot of reason. Some tourists go to see battlefields or religious shrines. Others are looking for culture, or simply want to have their picture taken in front of famous places. But most European tourists are looking for a sunny beach toile on. Northern European are willing to pay a lot of money and put up with a lot of inconveniences for the sun because they have so little of it. Residents of cities like London, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam spend a lot of their winter in the dark because the days are so short, and much of the rest the year in the rain. This is the reason the Mediterranean has always attracted them. Every summer, more than 25 million people travel to Mediterranean resort and beaches for their vacation. They all come for the same reason sun! The huge crowds mean lots of money for the economies of Mediterranean countries. Italy's 30, 000 hotels are booked solid every summer. And 13 million people camp out on French beaches, parks and roadsides. Spain's long sandy coastline attracts more people than anywhere else. 37 million tourists visit yearly, or one tourist for every person living in Spain. But there are signs that the area is getting more tourism than it can handle. The Mediterranean is already one the most polluted seas on earth. And with increased tourism, it's getting worse. The French can't figure out what to do with all the garbage left by campers around St. Tropez. And in many places, swimming is dangerous because of pollution. None of this, however, is spoiling anyone's fun. The Mediterranean gets more popular every year with tourists. Obviously, they don't go there for clean water and solitude. They tolerate traffic jams and seem to like crowded beaches. They don't even mind the pollution. No matter how dirty the water is, the coastline still looks beautiful. And as long as the sun shines, it's still better than sitting in the cold rain in Berlin, London, or Oslo.