单选题The minister headed the committee.A. was on the verge ofB. was on the basis ofC. was at the cost ofD. was in charge of

单选题Seeing the World Centuries Ago If you enjoy looking through travel books by such familiar authors as Arthur Frommer or Eugene Fodor, it will not surprise you to learn that travel writing has a long and venerable history. Almost from the earliest annals of recorded time individuals have found ready audiences for their accounts of journeys to strange and exotic locales. One of the earliest travel writers, a Greek geographer and historian named Strabo, lived around the time of Christ. Though Strabo is known to have traveled from east of the Black Sea west to Italy and as far south as Ethiopia, he also used details gleaned from other writers to extend and enliven his accounts. His multivolumed work Geography provides the only surviving account of the cities, peoples, customs, and geographical peculiarities of the whole known world of his time. Two other classic travel writers, the Italian Marco Polo and the Moroccan Ibn Battutah, lived in roughly the same time period. Marco Polo traveled to China with his father and uncle in about A. D. 1275 and remained there 16 or 17 years, visiting several other countries during his travels. When Marco returned to Italy he dictated his memoirs, including stories he had heard from others, to a scribe, with the resulting book Il milione being an instant success. Though difficult to attest to the accuracy of all he says, Marco"s book impelled Europeans to begin their great voyages of exploration. Ibn Battutah"s interest in travel began on his required Muslim journey to Mecca in 1325, and during his lifetime he journeyed through all the countries where Islam held sway. His travel book the Rihlah is a personalized account of desert journeys, court intrigues, and even the effect of the Black Death in the various lands he visited. In almost 30 years of traveling it is estimated that Ibn Battutah covered more than 75,000 miles.

单选题If the weatherman has predicted accurately, tomorrow will be a perfect day for our picnic.

单选题Our lives are {{U}}intimately{{/U}} bound up with theirs. A. tensely B. nearly C. carefully D. closely

单选题When the author was a child, he was made to help his father work because

单选题In the Navaho household,grandparents and other relatives play indispensable roles in raising children.

单选题The train came to an abrupt stop, making us wonder where we were. A. slow B. noisy C. sudden D. jumpy

单选题The Only Way Is Up Think of a modern city and the first image that comes to mind is the skyline. It is full of great buildings, pointing like fingers to heaven. It is true that some cities don"t permit buildings to go above a certain height. But these are cities concerned with the past. The first thing any city does when it wants to tell the world that it has arrived is to build skyscrapers. When people gather together in cities, they create a demand for land. Since cities are places where money is made, that demand can be met. And the best way to make money out of city land is to put as many people as possible in a space that covers the smallest amount of ground. That means building upwards. The technology existed to do this as early as the 19th century. But the height of buildings was limited by one important factor. They had to be small enough for people on the top floors to climb stairs. People could not be expected to climb a mountain at the end of their journey to work, or home. Elisha Otis, a US inventor, was the man who brought us the lift—or elevator, as he preferred to call it. However, most of the technology is very old. Lifts work using the same pulley system the Egyptians used to create the Pyramids. What Otis did was attach the system to a steam engine and develop the elevator brake, which stops the lift falling if the cords that hold it up are broken. It was this that did the most to gain public confidence in the new invention. In fact, he spent a number of years exhibiting lifts at fairgrounds, giving people the chance to try them out before selling the idea to architects and builders. A lift would not be a very good theme park attraction now. Going in a lift is such an everyday thing that it would just be boring. Yet psychologists and others who study human behavior find lifts fascinating. The reason is simple. Scientists have always studied animals in zoos. The nearest they can get to that with humans is in observing them in lifts. "It breaks all the usual conventions about the bubble of personal space we carry around with us—and you just can"t choose to move away," says workplace psychologist, Gary Fitzgibbon. "Being trapped in this setting can create different types of tensions," he says. Some people are scared of them. Others use them as an opportunity to get close to the boss. Some stand close to the door. Others hide in the comers. Most people try and shrink into the background. But some behave in a way that makes others notice them. There are a few people who just stand in a comer taking notes. Don"t worry about them. They are probably from a university.

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

单选题If headaches only occur at night, lack of fresh air is often the cause.

单选题The students will be {{U}}notified{{/U}} regarding the college entrance examination.

单选题In the Mesozoic period, the upward thrust of great rock masses created the Rocky Mountains and the Alps.

单选题Medicine depends on other ileitis for basic information, particularly some of their specialized branches.A. conventionallyB. obviouslyC. especiallyD. clearly

单选题Mysterious Nazca Drawings One of the most mysterious archaeological spectacles in the world is the immense complex of geometrical symbols, giant ground-drawings of birds and animals, and hundreds of long, ruler-straight lines, some right across mountains, which stretch over 1,200 square miles of the Peruvian tablelands, at Nazca. Nazca was first revealed to modern eyes in 1926 when three explorers looked down on the desert from a hillside at dusk and briefly saw a Nazca line highlighted by the rays of the sun. But it was not until the Peruvian airforce took aerial photographs in the 1940s that the full magnificence of the panorama was apparent. Hundreds of what looked like landing strips for aircraft were revealed. There were eighteen bird-like drawings, up to 400 feet long; four-sided figures with two lines parallel; and long needle-like triangles which ran for miles. Among the many abstract patterns were a giant spider, a monkey, a shark, all drawn on the ground on a huge scale. The scale is monumental, but from the ground almost invisible and totally incomprehensible. The amazing fact about Nazca, created more than 1,500 years ago, is that it can only be appreciated if seen from the air. Many, therefore, regarded it as a prehistoric landing ground for visitors from outer space, but Jim Woodman, an American explorer, who was long fascinated by the mystery of Nazca, had a different opinion. He believed that Nazca only made sense if the people who had designed and made these vast drawings on the ground could actually see them, and that led him to the theory that the ancient Peruvians had somehow learned to fly, as only from above could they really see the extent of their handiwork. With this theory in mind, he researched into ancient Peruvian legends about flight and came to the conclusion that the only feasible answer was a hot-air balloon. To prove his theory, Woodman would have to make such a thing using the same fabrics and fibers that would have been available to the men of Nazca at the time. He started by gathering information from ancient paintings, legends, books and archaeological sites. After many attempts, Woodman built a balloon-type airship. It took him into the air, letting him have the sensation he had never had from viewing the same ground that he had seen many times. His flight was a modern demonstration of an ancient possibility.

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

单选题Modern adult education for large numbers of people started in the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. Great economic and social changes were taking place: people were moving from rural areas to cities ; new types of work were being created in an expanding factory system. These and other factors produced a need for further education and re - education of adults. The earliest programs of organized adult education arose in Great Britain in the 1970s,with the founding of an adult school in Nottingham and a mechanics'institution in Glasgow. Benjamin Franklin and some friends found the earliest adult education in the US in Philadelphia in 1727. The earliest adult education program in the US was first founded inA. Nottingham.B. Glasgow.C. Washington.D. Philadelphi

单选题His judgment is obviously wrong.A. evidentlyB. possiblyC. totallyD. finally

单选题Governments regulate economic behavior, and the regulations _________.

单选题Weight on and off the Earth We are so used to our life on the surface of the earth that it can be quite an effort for our mind to break free of all the ideas that we take for granted. Because we can feel that things are heavy, we think of "weight" as being a fixed quality in an object, but it is not really fixed at all. If you could take a one-pound packet of butter 4,000 miles out from the earth, it would weigh only a quarter of a pound. Why would things weigh only a quarter as much as they do at the surface of the earth if we took them 4,000 miles out into space? The reason is this: All objects have a natural attraction for all other objects; this is called gravitational attraction. But this power of attraction between two objects gets weaker as they get farther apart. When the butter was at the surface of the earth, it was 4,000 miles from the center. When we took the butter 4,000 miles out, it was 8,000 from the center, which is twice the distance. If you double the distance between two objects, their gravitational attraction decreases four times (two times two). If you treble the distance, it gets nine times weaker (three times three) and so on. So this is one of the first things we need to remember: that the weight of an object in space is not the same as its weight on the surface of the earth. What about the weight of our pound of butter on the surface of the moon? At the distance the pull of the earth is about 4,000 times smaller than it is here on the surface, so we can forget all about the earth-pull on our butter. On the other hand, on the moon there will be an attraction between the butter and the moon, but the butter will weigh only about one-sixth as much as it does on the earth. This is because the moon is so much smaller than the earth. The amount of gravitational pull that a body produces depends on the amount of material in it. A packet of butter has a gravitational pull of its own; but this is very small in relation to the pull of something as large as the moon, or the earth, or the sun.

单选题A great deal has been done to remedy the situation.