单选题Ford Abandons Electric Vehicles The Ford motor company's abandonment of electric cars effectively signals the end of the road for the technology, analysts say. General Motors and Honda ceased production of battery-powered cars in 1999, to focus on fuel cell and hybrid electric gasoline engines, which are more attractive to the consumer. Ford has now announced it will do the same. Three years ago, the company introduced the Think City two-seater car and a golf cart called the THINK, or Think Neighbor. It hoped to sell 5,000 cars each year and 10,000 carts. But a lack of demand means only about 1,000 of the cars have been produced, and less than 1,700 carts have been sold so far in 2002. "The bottom line is we don't believe that this is the future of environment transport for the mass market," Tim Holmes of Ford Europe said on Friday. "We feel we have given electric our best shot. " The Think City has a range of only about 53 miles and up to a six-hour battery recharge time. General Motors' EVI electric vehicle also had a limited range, of about 100 miles. The very expensive batteries also mean electric cars cost much more than petrol-powered alternatives. An electric Toyota RAV4 EV vehicle costs over $42,000 in the US, compared with just $17,000 for the petrol version. Toyota and Nissan are now the only major auto manufacturers to produce electric vehicles. "There is a feeling that battery electric has been given its chance. Ford now has to move on with its hybrid program, and that is what we will be judging them on, " Roger Higman, a senior transport campaigner at UK Friends of the Earth, told the Environment News Service. Hybrid cars introduced by Toyota and Honda in the past few years have sold well. Hybrid engines offer greater mileage than petrol-only engines, and the batteries recharge themselves. Ford says it thinks such vehicles will help it meet planned new guidelines on vehicle emissions in the US. However, it is not yet clear exactly what those guidelines will permit. In June, General Motors and Daimler Chrysler won a court injunction, delaying by two years Californian legislation requiring car-makers to offer 100,000 zero-emission and other low-emission vehicles in the state by 2003. Car manufacturers hope the legislation will be rewritten to allow for more low-emission, rather than zero-emission, vehicles.

单选题Half of world's primates face extinction Almost 50% of the world's 634 primate (灵长类动物) species face extinction, according to a report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Habitat loss is a major cause, but many monkeys and apes are being hunted to extinction for food, especially in forests of south-east Asia. "It's cheaper to go into the forest and kill a monkey than to raise a chicken," says Jean-Christophe rie, deputy head of the IUCN's species programmeand a co—author of the report. "We've raised concerns for years about primates being in danger, but now we have solid data to show the situation is far more severe than we imagined," says Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, which co-funded the study. The areas most at risk are in Vietnam and Cambodia, where 90% of species are being driven to extinction by demand for monkey meat and baby monkeys as pets. Most acutely affected are medium-sized monkeys such as gibbons(长臂猿), leaf monkeys and langurs, which are easy for hunters to track down and kill because of their size and the noise they make. In South America. spider monkeys and capuchin monkeys(卷尾猴)have been hit hardest. In Africa, red colobus monkeys are now critically endangered. Eleven of the 13 species assessed were listed as critically endangered or endangered. Two may already be extinct. " Among the African species, the great apes such as gorillas (大猩猩) and bonobos have always tended to grab the limelight, and even thought they're deeply threatened, it is smaller primates such as the red colobus that could die out first," says Richard Wrangham, president of the International Primatological Society. Huge political efforts are needed now to reverse the impending losses of threatened species, says Vid. "What's needed is national legislation to protect biodiversity, creation of protected areas with dedicated staff, crackdowns on corruption, and captive breeding programmes," he says. But it will be difficult to halt and reverse the damage done by habitat destruction and the hunters. Once habitat is gone, animals have nowhere to go. Also, killing primates rapidly depletes populations, because they have fewer young than many other mammals and take much longer to breed and raise families.

单选题The People's Republic of China was {{U}}established{{/U}} in 1949.

单选题He demolished my argument in minutes.

单选题The first step in planning a marketing strategy for a new product is to analyze the breakdown of sales figures for competitive products.

单选题It's all advisable idea to get out of the dispute. A. wise B. urgent C. useless D. proper

单选题His claims seem credible to many people.

单选题If headaches only occur at night, lack of fresh air is often the cause. A．start B．begin C．happen D．visit

单选题In a bullfight, it is movement, not the color, of subjects that arouses the bull.A. confusesB. excitesC. scaresD. diverts

单选题The Railway Labor Mediation Act of 1926 supported the use of collective bargaining to avert interruption of rail service.

单选题Human Evolution Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-old there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby(particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone. There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide : stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today — everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes. For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years—even the past 100 years—our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: "they look at an organic being as average looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension. " No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

单选题The story was touching .

单选题Flying the Hypert Skies A little airplane has given new meaning to the term "going hyper. " The Hyper-X recently broke the record for air-breathing jet planes when it traveled at a hypersonic speed of seven times the speed of sound. That's about 5,000 miles per hour. At this speed, you'd get around the world -- flying along the equator (赤道) -- in less than 5 hours. The Hyper-X is an unmanned,experimental aircraft just 12 feet long. It achieves hypersonic (超音速的) speed using a special sort of engine known as a scramjet. It may sound like something from a comic book,but engineers have been experimenting with scramjets since the 1960s. For an engine to burn fuel and produce energy, it needs oxygen. A jet engine, like those on passenger airplanes, gets oxygen from the air. A rocket engine typically goes faster but has to carry its own supply of oxygen. A scramjet (紧急刹车) engine goes as fast as a rocket, but it doesn't have to carry its own oxygen supply. A scramjet's special design allows it to obtain oxygen from the air that flows through the engine. And it does so without letting the fast-moving air put out the combustion (燃烧) flames. However, a scramjet engine works properly only at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound. A booster rocket carried the Hyper-X to an altitude of about 100,000 feet for its test flight. The aircraft's record-beating flight lasted just 11 seconds. Although the little plane's self-powered flight lasted only 11 seconds, that brief journey on March 27 makes a major milestone on the way to a new breed of very fast airplanes, comments Werner J. A. Dahm of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In the future, engineers predict, airplanes equipped with scramjet engines could transport cargo quickly and cheaply to the brink of space. Such hypersonic jets could potentially carry passengers anywhere in the world in just a few hours. Out of the three experimental Hyper-X aircrafts built for NASA, only one is now left. The agency has plans for another 11-second hypersonic flight, this time at 10 times the speed of the sound.

单选题Lake Erie is linked to Lake Ontario by the Niagara River. A. connected to B. turned into C. emptied into D. diverted to

单选题 Genocide Many people feel that human beings are responsible for the disappearance of some other animal species. While we may have hastened the disappearance of some, abundant evidence suggests mankind has had little impact. Biologists point out that 50 species can be expected to disappear in the twentieth century but also remind us that about 50 species can be expected in the nineteenth century, and 50 species in each of the centuries before that. Dr. T. H. Jukes at the University of California has pointed out that about 100 million animal species have become extinct since life began on Earth about 3 billion years ago. Thus, animals come and animals go as a natural consequence of something Mr. Darwin discovered. The human race is a recent newcomer to the scene, so we've had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance of millions of species. In fact, when it comes right down to it, we're a miserable failure at genocide (种族灭绝). In spite of an all-out centuries-old war on rats, we haven't made a dent in their numbers, much less extinguished a single species. And in spite of all our high technology we haven't been successful in eliminating a single undesirable insect species! A friend of mine owns most of the Douglas DC-7 aircrafts left in the world. They make excellent spray planes because they can carry a lot of insecticide and fly for a very long time over great distances. Last year, his company sprayed most of the western Sahara and the Sahel regions of Africa to hold down the locusts and grasshoppers. This year, the environmentalists put pressure on the U.N. to stop it because dieldrin and malathion might cause an increase in the cancer risk of people in the western Sahara and the Sahel. As a result, the hoppers and locusts are back by the zillions and the crops are failing. But the people of West Africa certainly aren't going to worry about dying of cancer; they are dying of starvation instead. I've come to the conclusion that the people who are trying to save the world are probably quite sincere about it but they don't know much about science and certainly nothing about systems engineering.

单选题The Great Newspaper War Up until about 100 years ago, newspapers in the United States appealed only to the most serious readers. They used 1 illustrations and the articles were about politics or business. Two men changed that—Joseph Pulitzer 2 the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal . Pulitzer bought the New York World 3 1883. He changed it from a traditional newspaper into a very 4 one overnight. He added 5 illustrations and cartoons. And he told his reporters to write articles on 6 crime or scandal they could find. And they did. One of them even pretended she was crazy and then she 7 to a mental hospital. She then wrote a series of articles about the poor treatment of 8 in those hospitals. In 1895, Hearst came to New York from 9 California. He wanted the Journal to be more sensational and more exciting 10 the World . He also wanted it to be 11 , so he reduced the price by a penny. Hearst attracted attention because his headlines were bigger than 12 . He often said, "Big print makes big news." Pulitzer and Hearst did anything they 13 to sell newspapers. For example, Hearst sent Frederic Remington, the famous illustrator, 14 pictures of the Spanish-American War. When he got there, he told Hearst that no fighting was 15 . Hearst answered, "You furnish the pictures. I"ll furnish the war."

单选题The restaurant has a good reputation.A. systemB. nameC. relationD. leadership

单选题Sounds can be called a language only when they have a structure and a grammar.

单选题The use of the chemical may present a certain hazard to the laboratory workers.

单选题Intelligent car door clamps up when danger's about Accidents caused by car doors being opened into the path of oncoming vehicles or cyclists are common in cities. But these incidents could become a thing of the past, if doors that react to potential impacts catch on. The creative idea of Michael Graf at BMW and Michael Strolz's team at the Technical University of Munich, the "haptic"-technology that gives tactile feedback-doors could cut both road injuries and repair bills, they say. The current prototype looks like a normal car door, but an extra metal bar runs through its centre and connects to the car's frame between the hinges. In normal mode, the bar moves freely and doesn't affect the door's movement. However, if sensors detect a nearby obstacle at the same time as an accelerometer detects an attempt to open the door, the door's swing is restricted by a linear motor attached to the bar. To pass on more information to the user, the amount of door resistance is in proportion to the proximity of an object-for example, you might swing a door halfway open without problems before it gets stiffer as it nears a lamp post. The current prototype uses supersonic sensors to spot dangers, but because they have a limited field of view, the next version will use cameras that can span 180°, says Strolz. "Then we will be able to sense the complete workspace of the door and detect people walking by the car or cycling towards it," he says. Reactions from 16 volunteers who tried the new door at BMW's Munich research centre have been encouraging, the team told a recent conference on haptics in Salt Lake City, Utah. The technology is mature enough that a car factory could be pumping it out in cars within a year, says Strolz. The basic mechanism is like one already featured in some cars-for example, taxis with automatic passenger doors. However, BMW is yet to make any decision on whether to roll it out.