单选题 Old stereotypes die hard. Picture a video-game player and you will likely imagine a teenage boy, by himself, compulsively hammering away at a game involving rayguns and aliens that splatter when blasted. Today a gamer is as likely to be a middle-aged commuter playing 'Angry Birds' on her smartphone. In America, the biggest market, the average game-player is 37 years old. Two-fifths are female. Even teenagers with imaginary rayguns are more likely to be playing 'Halo' with their friends than playing alone Over the past ten years the video-game industry has grown from a small niche business to a huge, mainstream one. With global sales of $56 billion in 2010, it is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry. Despite the downturn, it is growing by almost 9% a year. Is this success due to luck or skill? The answer matters, because the rest of the entertainment industry has tended to treat gaming as being a lucky beneficiary of broader technological changes. Video gaming, unlike music, film or television, had the luck to be born digital: it never faced the struggle to convert from analogue. In fact, there is plenty for old media to learn. Video games have certainly been swept along by two forces: demography and technology. The first gaming generation—the children of the 1970s and early 1980s—is now over 30. Many still love gaming, and can afford to spend far more on it now. As gaming establishes itself as a pastime for adults, the social stigma and the worries about moral corruption that have historically greeted all new media, from novels to pop music, have dissipated. Meanwhile rapid improvements in computing power have allowed game designers to offer experiences that are now often more cinematic than the cinema. The industry has excelled in two particular areas: pricing and piracy. In an era when people are disinclined to pay for content on the web, games publishers were quick to develop 'freemium' models, where you rely on non-paying customers to build an audience and then extract cash only from a fanatical few. In China, where piracy is rampant, many games can be played online for nothing. Finns instead make money by selling in-game perks and 'virtual goods' to dedicated players. China is now the second-biggest gaming market, but does not even rank in the top 20 markets for the music business. As gaming comes to be seen as just another medium, its tech-savvy approach could provide a welcome shot in the arm for existing media groups. Time Warner and Disney have bought games firms; big-budget games, meanwhile, now have Hollywood-style launches.

单选题A treadmill (跑步机) desk may be one thing. But what about a desk with a built-in exercise bike? A new study, in the July 26 of Applied Ergonomics, found people working at a cycling workstation burned calories at 2.5 times the rate as when they simply sat and typed. Pedaling didn't affect typing performance. Using a cycling workstation for 10 minutes every hour throughout a day could help desk workers lose weight and reduce the 27 of diabetes and cardiovascular (心血管的) disease, researchers said. 28 pedaling could improve cognitive function, they said. University of Utah researchers 29 10 normal-weight undergraduates and faculty members who reported spending 6.3 hours a day, on average, at a desk. Subjects, men ages 24 to 40, spent two 10-minute sessions 30 the Gettysburg Address. In one session, subjects pedaled and typed. In the other, they sat and typed. 31 were instructed to select a resistance level they could comfortably maintain for 32 periods without interfering with typing. Subjects burned 255 calories per hour pedaling and typing and 100 calories per hour sitting and typing. The exertion level was rated as very, very light. Transcription time 33 7.7 minutes while pedaling and 7.6 minutes while sitting. Subjects made an average of 3.3 and 3.8 errors in the pedaling and non-pedaling experiments, 34 Heart rate and oxygen 35 were substantially higher while pedaling and typing. The study was small and involved young fit men. A researcher is part owner in a company that is working with the university to develop a cycling workstation called an Active Desk. A. averaged B. consumption C. evaporating D. Intermittent E. Irritating F. issue G. lure H. Participants I. prolonged J. recruited K. respectively L. risk M. Superiors N. tentatively O. transcribing

单选题 Thirst grows for living unplugged More people are taking breaks from the connected life amid the stillness and quiet of retreats like the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. A．About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on 'Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.' Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began, was stillness and quiet. B．A few months later, I read an interview with the well-known cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? 'I never read any magazines or watch TV,' he said, perhaps with a little exaggeration. 'Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.' He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because 'I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.' C．Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California, pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I'm reliably told, lies in 'black-hole resorts,' which charge high prices precisely became you can't get online in their rooms. D．Has it really come to this? The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Internet rescue camps in Korea (ROK) and China try to save kids addicted to the screen. Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time (no phone or e-mail) every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. Workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. E．The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen. Nicholas Carr notes in his book The Shallows. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will long for nothing more than intervals of freedom from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once. F．The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new. Of course, and wiser sods have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, 'and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.' He also famously remarked that all of man's problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. G．When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content, Henry David Thoreau reminded us that 'the man whose horse trots (奔跑) a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.' Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, 'When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.' We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we are so busy communicating. And we are rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. H．So what to do? More and more people I know seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation (沉思), or tai chi (太极); these aren't New Age fads (时尚饰物) so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two friends of mine observe an 'Internet sabbath (安息日)' every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning. Other friends take walks and 'forget' their cellphones at home. I．A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects 'exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.' More than that, empathy (同感，共鸣), as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are 'inherently slow.' J．I turn to eccentric measures to try to keep my mind sober and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I have yet to use a cellphone and I have never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot. None of this is a matter of asceticism (苦行主义); it is just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, or music. It is actually something deeper than mere happiness: it is joy, which the monk (僧侣) David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.' K．It is vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world. But it is only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. For more than 20 years, therefore, I have been going several times a year—often for no longer than three days—to a Benedictine hermitage (修道院), 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don't attend services when I am there, and I have never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it is only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and Mends that I will have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to meet with a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old boy around his shoulders. L．'You're Pico, aren't you?' the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we had met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he had been living in the hermitage as an assistant to one of the monks. 'What are you doing now?' I asked. We smiled. No words were necessary. 'I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,' he went on. The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what is new, but what is essential.

单选题 Questions22-24 are based on the recording you have just heard.

单选题 It may seem ridiculous, but in the hunt for sources of alternative energy researchers have come up with fuel cells which are powered by cheese—or at least whey, a by-product in cheese making. Whey is rich in lactose, a sugar which Georgia Antonopoulou, a biochemical engineer at the University of Patras, Greece, says can be consumed by cultures of bacteria contained within a fuel cell to generate an electric current. Microbial fuel cells, as such devices are known, are not a new idea but they are attracting more attention. The organic contents of whey pose an environmental hazard and many governments now impose strict regulations requiring factories to pay for its treatment before disposal. Whey constitutes about 70% of the volume of the milk were used to make cheese. So, just one small feta facility will need to dispose of as such as 4,000 tonnes of whey in a single year, says Dr Antonopoulou. Microbial fuel cells could help, and not just in the cheese-making industry. Breweries, pig farms, food-processing plants and even sewage works could gain from the technology. Traditional fuel cells work by using a catalytic material to oxidize a fuel, such as hydrogen, and make an electric current flow between two electrodes. Microbial fuel cells function in much the same way except that the catalytic reactions are carried out by bacteria contained within the fuel-cell chamber. Under anaerobic conditions (where oxygen is absent), metabolising the fuel by feeding off it and in doing so produce natural chemical reactions that produce a current. In theory microbial fuel cells can run on almost any kind of organic matters, says Chris Melhuish, head of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, England. 'All you have to do is match the microbial culture with the type of stuff you want to use as fuel,' he says. Dr Melhuish has been trying to power robots on domestic waste-water, but it is tricky. Ideally you would want to use cheap raw-waste products, he says. But traditionally the fuel cells work best with a refined fuel in the form of solutions containing synthetic sugars, such as glucose. However, Dr Antonopoulou has now shown that, using a culture of bacteria obtained from her local waste-water plant, it is possible to get almost as much power from raw whey as from refined fuel, provided the whey is diluted. The trouble is the power output still only amounts to milliwatts, barely enough to trickle-charge a cellphone. And working with raw waste water also presents challenges. Initially Dr Antonopoulou and her colleagues found that the coulombic efficiency of their cells-a measure of how many electrons produced actually flow into a circuit-was particularly low, at around just 2%. This turned out to be because a second set of microbes, within the whey itself, was absorbing them. So, by sterilizing the whey first to kill these other bugs they have now boosted the coulombic efficiency to around 25%.

单选题In a sense, the new protectionism is not protectionism at all, at least not in the 27 sense of the term. The old protectionism referred only to trade restricting and trade expanding devices, such as the tariff or export subsidy. The new protectionism is much 28 than this: it includes 29 into foreign trade but is not limited to them. The new protectionism, in fact, 30 to how the whole of government intervention into the private economy affects international trade. The emphasis on trade is still there, thus came the term 'protection'. But what is new is the realization that virtually all government activities can affect international economic relations. The 31 of the new protectionism in the Western world reflects the victory of the interventionist, or welfare economy over the market economy. Jab Tumiler writes, 'The old protectionism...coexisted, without any apparent intellectual difficulty with the acceptance of the market as a 32 as well as an international economic distribution mechanism—indeed, protectionists as well as (if not more than) free traders stood for laissez faire (放任政策). Now, as in the 1930s, protectionism is an expression of a profound scepticism as to the ability of the market to 33 resources and incomes to societies' satisfaction.' It is 34 this profound scepticism of the market economy that is responsible for the protectionism. In a 35 economy, economic change of various colours implies redistribution of resources and incomes. The same opinion in many communities apparently is that such redistributions often are not proper. 36 , the government intervenes to bring about a more desired result. A. market B. welfare C. traditional D. national E. narrow F. refers G. security H. distribute I. interventions J. Therefore K. emergence L. broader M. significantly N. insurance O. precisely

单选题 知识和人才是创新型经济最重要的要素，知识是创新的源泉，人才是创新的主体。

单选题 Everyday each of us can renew our efforts to lead a healthier lifestyle so that we can remain free from illness and pain. Every health expert will advise that as part of any healthy living plan regular exercise should play an important part. For a large 26 of people enrolling at the local gym is the answer which will also produce results. There is one negative point however—upper back pain. What is the cause of upper back pain? In most instances bad posture is the chief 27 . This is often because we spend long periods of time sitting or standing in the same position, generally this tends to be in our place of work. Sitting at desk top computers is one source of this problem! By 28 the same position the muscles in the upper back which connect the shoulders and help to keep our back straight become tense, stiff and painful. If you find yourself 29 upper back pain it is highly likely that you have strained a muscle, this condition can be extremely painful but are easily treated by your doctor following an accurate 30 using X-rays. Keeping fit through physical exercise should not be stopped because of upper back pain, indeed it is an excellent method to prevent this painful problem and can help in relieving 31 . The use of weights as part of a gym workout may not be 32 , however if under close supervision of a trained professional it is still possible. There are 33 other types of exercise which can be continued whilst suffering upper back pain such as jogging or walking either using a treadmill (踏车) at home or out on the streets. The whole aim is to prevent stiffening of the muscles. The best way to avoid upper back pain is to try to avoid sitting or standing in the same position for 34 periods, if it is possible try to have a stretch break every hour or so. This may not be possible therefore, you should try to find ways of jogging your memory throughout the day to keep your posture correct—put little notes round your computer screen! It will 35 come naturally and hopefully the problem will disappear. A. eliminate I. exactly B. suffering J. majority C. extended K. sophisticated D. eventually L. diagnosis E. advisable M. symptoms F. criminal N. maintaining G. abandoning O. virtually H. numerous

单选题 故宫 故宫，又名紫禁城(Forbidden City)，位于北京市中心，今天人们称它为故宫，意为“过去的皇宫”。它是无与伦比的古代建筑杰作，世界现存的最大、最完整的古建筑群，被誉为世界五大宫[北京故宫、法国凡尔赛宫(Versailles Palace)、英国白金汉宫(Buckingham Palace)、美国白宫(White House)、俄罗斯克里姆林宫(Kremlin)]之首。故宫建成于明代。在当时落后的社会生产条件下，能建造这样宏伟高大的建筑群，充分反映了中国古代劳动人民的高度智慧和创造才能。

单选题 When you see a corporate scoundrel go unpunished, or a puppy die of cancer, or Rashida Jones gifted with talent, beauty, and smarts, you might be forgiven for asking: Is life fair? And yet most of us cling to the idea that people generally get what they deserve. Our belief in the world's fairness can veer into magical thinking. For example, one study found that people who frequently patronize a business believe they are more likely than other customers to win a given prize drawing by that business—a phenomenon the researchers called the 'lucky loyalty' effect. A similar logic leads people to invest in karma. In one experiment, people at a job fair who were led to think that the job-search process was beyond their control offered to donate more money to an unrelated charity than did those who were led to believe the opposite. In a follow-up study, job seekers who were encouraged to see their job search as beyond their control were more optimistic about their employment prospects when they gave money to charity than when they didn't. Faith in fairness does have a dark side. One study found that women who believe strongly that the world is fair are more likely than other women to blame the victim of a hypothetical stranger rape. And people who believe in a just world are less likely to hire a job candidate who's been laid off. When bad things happen to good people, we sometimes convince ourselves that the bad things are in fact good things—blessings in disguise. After people's appetite for justice was deliberately stoked, they tended to see a 30-year-old who had suffered a debilitating accident in childhood as enjoying a more meaningful life than one who hadn't. Such thoughts may ease the pain associated with injustice, and even lead to support for the status quo: Researchers found that when people felt powerless, they were more likely to say that race, class, and gender disparities were justified. Certain social institutions and ideologies, including religion and political conservatism, may further increase our complacence. In a series of surveys, respondents' religiosity correlated with belief in a just world, belief that capitalism is fair, social and economic conservatism, acceptance of income inequality, and belief in the fairness of the American social system.

单选题 中国人的英语学习 中国学习英语的人口数量全球最多。数据显示，中国有4亿多人在学英语，约占全国总人口的1/3。目前，中国的小学，甚至幼儿园都开设英语课程。英语学习贯穿中国学生的整个学习生涯，英语是中国学生必须学习的一门科目。中国是世界上对英语学习最狂热的国家之一，“英语热”在中国的持续也引发了激烈的争论。很多人认为应该在高考中降低英语考试的分值，突出语文的重要性，让更多的人关注自己的母语。