单选题Speaker A: Good afternoon, I'm here for my four o'clock appointment with Dr. Brown.Speaker B: ______ A. Nice to see you. I'm Dr. Brown's secretary. B. Why don't you have a seat for a moment? C. Excuse me, when did you make this appointment with him? D. I'm sorry. He will be busy the whole afternoon.

单选题The best title for this story could be ____.

单选题More than 30000 drivers and front seat passengers are killed or seriously injured each year. At a speed of only 30 miles per hour it is the same as falling from a third floor window. Wearing a seat belt saves lives; it reduces your chance of death or serious injury by more than half. Therefore drivers or front seat passengers over 14 in most vehicles must wear a seat belt. If you do not, you could be fined up to ￡50. It will not be up to the drivers to make sure you wear your belt. But it will be the driver"s responsibility to make sure that children under 14 do not ride in the front unless they are wearing a seat belt of some kind. However, you do not have to wear a seat belt if you are reversing your vehicle; or you are making a local delivery or collecting using a special vehicle; or if you have a valid medical certificate which excuses you from wearing it. Make sure these circumstances apply to you before you decide not to wear your seat belt. Remember you may be taken to court for not doing so, and you may be fined if you cannot prove to the court that you have been excused from wearing it.

单选题Man: I"m terribly sorry, Ann, I lost the magazine you lent me that other day. Woman: It doesn"t matter. It was a back number anyway. Question: What does the woman mean?

单选题There is no question that the academic enterprise has become increasingly global, particularly in the sciences. Nearly three million students now study outside their home countriesa 57% increase in the last decade. Foreign students now dominate many U.S. doctoral programs, accounting for 64% of Ph. D. s in computer science, for example. Faculty members are on the move, too. Half of the world's top physicists no longer work in their native countries. And major institutions such as New York University are creating branch campuses in the Middle East and Asia. There are now 162 satellite campuses worldwide, an increase of 43% in just the past three years. At the same time, growing numbers of traditional source countries for students from South Korea to Saudi Arabia (沙特阿拉伯), are trying to improve both the quantity and quality of their own degrees, engaging in a fierceand expensiverace to recruit students and create world-class research universities of their own. Such competition has led to considerable hand-wringing in the West. During a 2008 campaign stop, for instance, then—candidate Barack Obama expressed alarm about the threat that such academic competition poses to U. S. competitiveness. Such concerns are not limited to the United States. In some countries, worries about educational competition and brain drains have led to academic protectionism. India, for instance, places legal and bureaucratic barriers in front of Western universities that want to set up satellite campuses to enroll local students. Perhaps some of the anxiety over the new global academic enterprise is understandable, particularly in a period of massive economic uncertainty. But educational protectionism is as big a mistake as trade protectionism is. The globalization of higher education should be embraced, not fearedincluding in the United States. There is every reason to believe that the worldwide competition for human talent, the race to produce innovative research, the push to extend university campuses to multiple countries, and the rush to train talented graduates who can strengthen increasingly knowledge-based economies will be good for the United States, as well.

单选题Woman: Hello, this is Doctor Gray's office. We're calling to remind you of your 4:15 appointment for your annual check-up tomorrow.Man: Oh, thanks. It's a good thing you called. I thought it was 4:15 today.Question: What do we learn from the conversation?

单选题The vast differences in the ways students learn are often ______ when they are taught the same thing, in the same way, at the same time. Therefore many of them feel little enthusiastic and even hostile for the ways instruction is handled. A. disregarded B. distinguished C. discharged D. discerned

单选题From his demeanor (禁止) on entering the room I ______ that the interview had not gone well for him. A. informed B. implied C. indicated D. inferred

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} If the population of the Earth goes on increasing at its present rate, there will eventually not be enough resources left to sustain life on the planet. By the middle of the 21 century, if present trends continue, we will have used up all the oil that drives our cars, for example. Even if scientists develop new ways of feeding the human race, the crowded conditions on Earth will make it necessary for us to look for open space somewhere else. But none of the other planets in our solar system are capable of supporting life at present. One possible solution to the problem, however, has recently been suggested by an American scientist, Professor Carl Sagan. Sagan believes that before the Earth's resources are completely exhausted, it will be possible to change the atmosphere of Venus and so create a new world almost as large as Earth itself. The difficulty is that Venus is much hotter than the Earth and there is only a tiny amount of water there. Sagan proposed that algae, organisms that can live in extremely hot or cold atmospheres and at the same time produce oxygen, should be bred in conditions similar to those on Venus. As soon as this has been done, the algae will be placed in small rockets. Spaceships will then fly to Venus and fire the rockets into the atmosphere. In a fairly short time, the algae will break down the carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon. When the algae have done their works, the atmosphere will become cooler but before man can set foot on Venus, it will be necessary for the oxygen to produce rain. The surface of the planet will still be too hot for men to land on it but the rain will eventually fall and in a few years something like Earth will be reproduced on Venus. If the experiments are successful, life will become possible there, but it will not be pleasant at first. When they go to Venus, the first colonists will have to take plenty of water with them and get used to days and nights lasting 60 Earth-days. But there will also be some advantages. The colonists will live longer because their hearts will suffer less strain than on Earth. Apart from that, they will be exploiting a new world while those still on Earth are living in closed, uncomfortable conditions. Perhaps it will be the only way to ensure the survival of the human race.

单选题There have been several claims to have cloned humans over the past few years. Most have been bogus. But the announcement made this week by Woo Suk Hwang, of Seoul National University in South Korea, and his colleagues, is serious. It is the first to achieve the accolade of publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Dr. Hwang s work appears in Science. The terminology of human development has become slippery over the past few years, in the hands of both "life-begins-at-conception" propagandists who want to stop this sort of research, and publicity-seeking scientists who have claimed more than they have really achieved. What Dr. Hwang and his team have created is not what developmental biologists would normally refer to as an embryo. But it is a genuine scientific advance. South Korea's researchers have taken egg cells from volunteer women, removed the nuclei from those cells (which contain only half of the genetic complement required to make a human being, since the other half is provided by the sperm), and replaced each nucleus with one taken from one of the volunteer's body cells (which contains a full genetic complement). Given a suitable chemical kick-start, such re-nucleated cells will begin dividing as though they were eggs that had been fertilised in the more traditional manner. Since they have all of the mother's genes, they count as clones. Then the team cultured the dividing eggs until they had formed structures called blastocysts, with a few dozen cells each. This is the significant advance. At this stage the structure, though still just a featureless ball of cells, has started to differentiate into the body's three basic cell types (known as endoderm, mesoderm and ectoderm). The researchers were able to extract cells from some of their blastocysts, and grow tissues containing all three cell types. These are so-called stem cells, which can be directed to form a wide variety of the specialised cells from which organs are built. That, not the creation of new human beings, is the stated reason for this sort of research, since specialised cells made this way might be used to replace the cells lost in diseases such as Parkinson's and type-Ⅰ diabetes. This process is known as therapeutic cloning. No doubt Dr Hwang's scientific success will sharpen the debate between those who see therapeutic cloning as a potential force for good, and those who see it as a step on the road to a cloned human being. The former have been queuing up to praise the scientist's work. It is "a major medical milestone" that could help spur a "revolution", said Robert Lanza, a cloning expert. But opponents of therapeutic cloning should not worry too much yet. The road from a blastocyst to a baby is a long and complex one. Nevertheless, the South Korean breakthrough makes it more urgent than ever that legislation be passed differentiating clearly between therapeutic and reproductive cloning—permitting the former and prohibiting the latter.

单选题In what now seems like the prehistoric times of computer history, the earth"s postwar era, there was quite a widespread concern that computers would take over the world from man one day. Already today, less than forty years later, as computers are relieving us of more and more of the routine tasks in business and in our personal lives, we are faced with a less dramatic but also less foreseen problem. People tend to be over-trusting of computers and are reluctant to challenge their authority. Indeed, they behave as if they were hardly aware that wrong buttons may be pushed, or that a computer may simply malfunction (失误). Obviously, there would be no point in investing in a computer if you had to check all its answers, but people should also rely on their own internal computers and check the machine when they have the feeling that something has gone wrong. Questioning and routine double-checks must continue to be as much a part of good business as they were in pre-computer days. Maybe each computer should come with the warning, for all the help this computer may provide, it should not be seen as a substitute for fundamental thinking and reasoning skills.

单选题Woman: Don't you know Jim works as a dish washer at a restaurant around the corner? Man: It isn't a bad job to start with. I wouldn't mind that job for the summer if no others are available. Question: What does the man mean?

单选题Man:I'm really exhausted．But I don't want to miss the film that comes on at 11. Woman:If I were you, I'd skip it. We both have to get up early tomorrow. And anyway, I've heard it isn't that exciting. Question:What does the woman mean?

单选题American consumers like convenience very much. During the last 50 years, there has been a dramatic increase in such labor-saving devices as automatic washing machines, clothes dryers, dishwashers, food processors, microwave ovens, garbage disposals and power lawn mowers. Today, all of these and many more, are found in a typical suburban home. These labor-saving devices are designed to reduce the time spent on housework. However, the time that Americans save is quickly spent on other activities. The American desire for convenience also created the concept of fast-food restaurants, found in every city and almost every small town in the United States, and now exported all over the world. These fast-food restaurants, such as McDonald's and KFC, serve sandwiches, salads, fried chicken, seafood, and other food to hurried customers in five minutes or less, often at a drive-up window. There are also a wide variety of restaurants that will deliver Chinese food, pizza, and other dishes to people's homes in about a half-hour. In many areas there are "take-out taxis" that will deliver food from the menus of 20 or 30 different restaurants for a small charge For those who prefer to prepare their food at home, American grocery stores are full of convenience foods that are packaged and ready to cook or even precooked. Like microwave ovens and dishwashers, fast-food and take-out restaurants are convenient because they save the American consumer time that would otherwise be spent fixing meals or cleaning up. More than half of all the women in the United States are currently employed. This includes mothers with children under the age of 18. More than half the women with little children under the age of six hold jobs. Sixty-eight percent of the women who have school-age children are employed. Families with working mothers need all the time-savers they can get. Thus, the conveniences that Americans desire reflect not so much a leisurely lifestyle as a busy lifestyle in which even minutes of time are too valuable to be wasted. Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to see in this a curious paradox (自相矛盾) in the American character. He observed that Americans were so busy working to acquire comforts and conveniences that they were unable to relax and to enjoy leisure time when they had it. Today, many Americans have what one medical doctor has called "the hurry sickness".

单选题 For centuries, explorers have risked their lives venturing into the unknown for reasons that were to varying degrees economic and nationalistic (国家主义的). Columbus went west to look for better trade routes to the Orient and to promote the greater glory of Spain. Lewis and Clark journeyed into the American wilderness to find out what the U. S. had acquired when it purchased Louisiana, and the Appolo astronauts rocketed to the moon in a dramatic show of technological muscle during the cold war. Although their missions blended commercial and political-military imperatives, the explorers involved all accomplished some significant science simply by going where no scientists had gone before. Today Mars looms (隐约出现的) as humanity's next great terra incognita (未探明之地). And with growing emphasis on international cooperation in large space ventures, it is clear that imperatives (需要，必要) other than profits or nationalism will have to compel human beings to leave their tracks on the planet's reddish surface. Could it be that science, which has long played a minor role in exploration, is at last destined to take a leading role? The question naturally invites a couple of others: Are there experiments that only humans could do on Mars? Could those experiments provide insights profound enough to justify the expense of sending people across interplanetary space? With Mars the scientific stakes are arguably higher than they have ever been. The issue of whether life ever existed on the planet, and whether it persists to this day, has been highlighted by mounting evidence that the Red Planet once had abundant stable, liquid water and by the continuing controversy over suggestions that bacterial fossils rode to Earth on a meteorite (陨石) from Mars. A more conclusive answer about life on Mars, past or present, would give researchers invaluable data about the range of conditions under which a planet can generate the complex chemistry that leads to life. If it could be established that life arose independently on Mars and Earth, the finding would provide the first concrete clues in one of the deepest mysteries in all of science: the prevalence of life in the universe.

单选题If nature does not provide man with the necessary material, it is the laboratory ______ he will turn to for it.

单选题He ran so fast that ______ could catch him up in his school.

单选题Speaker A: I don"t have the slightest idea of what you want to say. Speaker B: You don"t have to.______

单选题Woman: Maybe we should take the front street this morning. The radio announcer said that the traffic is very heavy on the freeway.Man: Well, if he says to take the front street, we should go the other way.Question: What does the man think of the radio announcer?

单选题W: I"ll wear this blue jacket for the evening. I like the color on me, don"t you think? M: I think it looks terrific on you really! Q: What does the man think of the woman"s choice of clothing?