单选题 When the young man walked into the office to see the headmaster, he had butterflies in his stomach. This underlined part means ______.

单选题 Which of the following prepositional phrases can function as an adverbial?

单选题 Fool ______ Michael is, he could not have done such a thing.

单选题 Which of the following sentences expresses a future action?

单选题 A. abolish B. accelerate C. ambiguity D. bring E. dispense F. evidence G. expenditure H. inquiry I. irrational J. lead K. outpace L. shift M. simply N. striking O. unanimously For the past four decades that basic tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation (增加)—A.I. versus I.A. —has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies. Now, as the pace of technological change continues to 42 , it has become increasingly possible to design computing systems that enhance the human experience, or now—in a growing number of cases—completely 43 with it. Watson is an effort by IBM researchers to advance a set of techniques used to process human language. It provides 44 evidence that computing systems will no longer be limited to responding to simple commands. Machines will increasingly be able to pick out jargon (行话) and even riddles. In attacking the problem of the 45 of human language, computer science is now closing in on what researchers refer to as the 'Paris Hilton problem' —the ability, for example, to determine whether an 46 is being made by someone who is trying to reserve a hotel in France, or 47 to pass time surfing the Internet. Traditionally, economists have argued that while new forms of automation may displace jobs in the short run, over longer periods of time economic growth and job creation have continued to 48 any job-killing technology. Over the past century and a half the 49 from being a largely agrarian (农业的) society to one in which less than 1 percent of the United States labor force is in agriculture is frequently cited as 50 of the economy's ability to reinvent itself. Rapid progress in natural language processing is beginning to 51 to a new wave of automation that promises to transform areas of the economy that have until now been untouched by technological change.

单选题 China, as a developing country, should speed up her ______ development and improve the people's life level.

单选题 SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are four passages followed by nine multiple choicequestions. For each question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, Cand D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer. Passage One Comedy's legendary Monty Python members-you know. 'I'm a lumberjack andI'm okay,' the Killer Rabbit, the Dead Parrot-were tired of seeing their legendarysketches pirated and fuzzily posted on You Tube, free to whoever wanted a quicklaugh. So they posted their own, higher-quality versions on YouTube-also free-but letfans know that complete DVD versions were available for purchase. Sales rose 23,000 percent. 'Free worked, and worked brilliantly…People are making lots of moneycharging nothing. Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we haveessentially created a country-sized economy around the price of $0.00.' Anderson,48, the editor of Wired magazine, discussed the allure of zero with Jesse Kornbluth. In the 20th century 'free' meant giving away one thing to create demand foranother. Get a free cell phone, for example, by buying a monthly plan. What is 'free'now? Yes, 20th-century 'free' was about real objects made of atoms. Real costs were involved, so the consumer paid one way or another. In the 21th century, 'free' is digital bit with marginal costs. For all practical purposes, they really are free. In the digital economy, someone pays, but increasingly it's not you. Google and Wikipedia, for example, don't show up on your credit card. So how do you pay? Not with money, but with your time and attention. Some resources, of course, are scarce and getting scarcer; you pay for those. Digital goods and services, because they can be reproduced and distributed at almost no cost, are abundant. Once you've given content away on the Web, can you get people to pay? Absolutely. Use 'free' to get an audience, then segment your user base so you have a free version and a premium one. The Wall Street Journal created a clever hybrid-some free articles, some available only to paid subscribers. I get the sense that-when it comes to news, anyway-we'll soon have two classes of Internet users: 1 ) people who have money and will pay for quality reporting and analysis, and 2) people who are less well-off or care less about quality and will accept any information that's free. So the elite will be better informed, and others may get trashier media. I'm simply observing what happens in economics when marginal costs fall. In economic terms, 'free' is the law of gravity. I don't tell the apple to fall; it just falls. I don't tell water to flow downhill; it just does. In that way, it's simple: As costs approach zero, 'free' prevails. Passage Two Diamonds, sparkling under an African sun, have an attraction commensurate with their high price and beauty. For Anglo-American the opportunity to get their hands on some more has proved too much to resist. On November 4th the global mining giant announced that it would acquire the 40% of De Beers, a company that mines two-fifths of the world's diamonds, from the Oppenheimer family for $5.1 billion. This takes Anglo-American's stake in De Beers to 85%; the rest is owned by the government of Botswana, where the firm digs up its gems. The price looks right. Demand for diamonds has bounced back after the credit crisis in 2008 and the following recession in the rich world. More and more wealthy Indians and Brazilians seem keen to sport a 'rock' to show just how well they are doing. And the shrewd Oppenheimers do not seem to be getting out of the business because its future looks bleak. There is apparently no family member who wants to take on diamond mining. Nicky Oppenheimer, De Beers's chairman, foresaw the sale in February when he stood down from the board of Anglo-American. For Anglo-American it resolves the issue of its non-controlling stake in De Beers. Analysts have long reckoned it should either sell or try to increase its stake. In fact the firm might yet spin off De Beers with an IPO. The terms of the deal allow the Oppenheimers to pocket some more cash from a flotation or sale in the next couple of years, suggesting that such an outcome is not unlikely. It would also make sense. Anglo-American is a different beast to the global diversified mining giants that would count as its competitors. It stood apart from the wave of mining mega-mergers over the past decade or so-except as a potential target. The consolidation and the emergence of huge markets for the world's resources have propelled BHP Billiton, for instance, to become one of the world's biggest listed companies. Many would claim that Anglo-American has suffered as a result. Once one of the world's biggest miners, it now ranks alongside Xstrata, a company just ten years old, which in 2009 even attempted a nil-premium takeover of Anglo. It also has a significant portion of its assets in South Africa. And unlike its peers it has a large platinum business, as well as all the diamonds. Anglo-American's recent strategy has been to diversify out of South Africa, where the threat of nationalization, scarcely credible but a fear for investors none the less, hangs over it. Black-empowerment laws, a scarcity of water and electricity as well as an obstinate workforce make it a difficult place to operate. Botswana is far more accommodating, but it might also make sense to get out of diamonds: it is a business that is more about branding the rocks and less about the savvy capital deployment and logistical know-how that are the hallmarks of the mining business. If that is Anglo' eventual aim, then the deal looks like a smart move. Passage Three Younger Americans will have to take our word for it: there was a time, way back when Ronald Reagan was president, when your countrymen ordered coffee by simply asking for 'coffee'. Ordering a 'venti skinny chai latte' or a 'grande chocolate cookie crumble frappuccino' would have earned, at best, a blank stare. But that was before Howard Schultz took Starbucks from a single coffeehouse in downtown Seattle to a chain with more than 17,000 shops in 55 countries. The chain grew so quickly, and in some areas seemed so ubiquitous, that as early as 1998 a headline in The Onion, a satirical American newspaper, joked, 'New Starbucks Opens in Rest Room of Existing Starbucks'. After suffering through lean years in 2008 and 2009, the company is again going strong. In the 2011 financial year the company served 60m customers per week — more than ever. It also had its highest-ever earnings-per-share ($1.62) and global net revenue ($11.7 billion). Yet in 2011 Starbucks decided to do away with something important: it dropped the word 'Coffee' from its logo. While coffee remains as central to Starbucks' business and identity as hamburgers are to McDonald's, the company's recent American acquisitions have moved it beyond java. In November 2011 it acquired Evolution Fresh, a small California-based juice company, for $30m, giving the company a foothold in America's $1.6 billion high-end juice market. And in June 2012 Starbucks bought a bakery, Bay Bread, and its La Boulange-branded cafes, for $100m. Starbuck's customers 'have never been as satisfied with our food as our coffee,' explained Troy Alstead, Starbucks's chief financial officer. On November 14th Starbucks made it largest acquisition yet, buying Teavana, an Atlanta based tea retailer, for $620m. This is not the firm's first attempt into the tea market — its stores sell tea, of course, and it bought Tazo, a tea manufacturer and distributor, back in 1999 — but it is by far its boldest. When Starbucks bought Tazo it was simply a brand, but Teavana has some 300 shops, largely mall-based, throughout North America. Mr. Alstead hopes that scale will allow Starbucks 'to do for tea what we did for coffee'. This may seem, as they say at Starbucks, a tall order. Americans drink far more coffee than tea. In 2011 the average coffee consumption was 9.39 pounds per person, while tea was a paltry 0.9 pounds. Coffee has long been an essential part of American mornings. Tea has no comparably firm position, except for the tooth-shiveringly sweet iced tea served during meals in the South (85% of all tea consumed in America is iced). That said, since 1980 America's coffee consumption has fallen, and is forecast to fall further. Consumption of tea, on the other hand, has grown, and is forecast to keep growing-perhaps benefiting from the idea that it has health benefits that coffee lacks, perhaps driven partly by immigration from tea-drinking countries. The Tea Association of the USA put the value of the tea market in America at $8.2 billion in 2011, up from $1.8 billion just 20 years earlier, and forecasts that it will nearly double in value again by 2014. The sharpest growth will come from tea that is green-which also happens to be the color of money and the logo of Starbucks. Passage Four Late last year, Airbnb announced that it's going after the major hotel chains-which at first sounded kind of cute, like a precocious Little League pitcher saying he's going to strike out Miguel Cabrera. But when CEO Brian Chesky laid out his thinking for me in Airbnb's new, funky headquarters in San Francisco, I thought the investors who have pumped $326 million into the company might not be too dim. Airbnb is becoming much more than a way to spend $26 a night to sleep in London with five other people at The Imperial Fleapit. In fact, Airbnb is looking like a proof point of a trend that has been getting a lot of attention lately. Some refer to it as the DIY-for do it yourself-movement. Chesky uses the term 'decentralized production (分散式生产).' Marc Andreessen hit on the concept in a manifesto entitled 'Why Software Is Eating the World?' It all points to the same idea: Information technology is eroding the power of large-scale mass production. We're instead moving toward a world of massive numbers of small producers offering unique stuff-and of consumers who reject mass-produced stuff. The Internet, software, 3D printing, social networks, cloud computing and other technologies are making this economically feasible-in fact, desirable. The hotel industry-and the way Airbnb thinks about it-is an example of how that is playing out. There is a fundamental truth about big hotel chains that is only now being exposed in the Internet age: Hotel chains grew out of a lack of information. In the middle of last century, cars and highways made the world far more mobile. Many more people traveled to towns they didn't know, and they needed places to sleep. They had no way to know which hotel or boarding house might be nice or offer amenities they wanted. Travel guides, like Mobil's, popped up in the 1950s, but fdr the most part information remained scarce. Chains took advantage of that data deficit. If you knew a Holiday Inn in one town, you knew the Holiday Inn in the next town would be roughly the same. The brand's motto played off this: 'The best surprise is no surprise. ' The uniformity and comfort of a chain trumped the risk of an unknown, independent place. As chains got bigger, they could afford to widely advertise-a way to spread more information about the consistency of their hotels. Independents couldn't keep up. They had limited ways to get information to travelers. As long as this big information gap existed, chains grew and independents struggled. The gap drove chains to offer uniform accommodations at scale-and we got today's hospitality industry, dominated by the likes of Hilton, Marriott and Starwood. Chesky got to thinking about this when his late grandfather told him Airbnb reminded him of his childhood, when his family would arrive in towns and stay at boarding houses. Chesky thought: If the Internet was around back then, would hotel chains as we know them have been created? 'And the answer is absolutely not,' Chesky says. 'I'm not saying there wouldn't be hotels, but they wouldn't look like they do today.'

单选题 I used to tell interviewers ______ I wrote every day except for Christmas.

单选题 Which of the following sentences is INCORRECT?

单选题 ______, Vincente T. Ximenes spent many years as a government economist.

单选题 The company is on the verge of bankruptcy, and hundreds of jobs are ______.

单选题 Mr. Smith, we regret ______ you that the materials for you ordered are out of stock now.

单选题 How fluently she speaks Chinese! The italicized part is ______.

单选题 The flags in the stadium ______ in the wind.

单选题 —Would you like me to go to the dentist with you? —No, you ______ with me.

单选题 Section A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. Passage One (1) The Clyde whom Samuel Griffiths described as having met at the Union League Club in Chicago, was a somewhat modified version of the one who had fled from Kansas City three years before. He was now twenty, a little taller and more firmly but scarcely any more robustly built, and considerably more experienced, of course. (2) For since leaving his home and work in Kansas City and coming in contact with some rough usage in the world—humble tasks, wretched rooms, no intimates to speak of, plus the compulsion to make his own way as best he might—he had developed a kind of self-reliance and smoothness of address such as one would scarcely have credited him with three years before. There was about him now, although he was not nearly so smartly dressed as when he left Kansas City, a kind of conscious gentility (文雅) of manner which pleased, even though it did not at first arrest attention. Also, and this was considerably different from the Clyde who had crept away from Kansas City in a box car, he had much more of an air of caution and reserve. (3) For ever since he had fled from Kansas City, and by one humble device and another forced to make his way, he had been coming to the conclusion that on himself alone depended his future. His family, as he now definitely sensed, could do nothing for him. They were too impractical and too poor—his mother, father, Esta, all of them. (4) At the same time, in spite of all their difficulties, he could not now help but feel drawn to them, his mother in particular, and the old home life that had surrounded him as a boy—his brother and sisters, Esta included, since she, too, as he now saw it, had been brought no lower than he by circumstances over which she probably had no more control. And often, his thoughts and mood had gone back with a definite and disconcerting pang (一阵剧痛) because of the way in which he had treated his mother as well as the way in which his career in Kansas City had been suddenly interrupted—his loss of Hortense Briggs—a severe blow; the troubles that had come to him since; the trouble that must have come to his mother and Esta because of him. (5) On reaching St. Louis two days later after his flight, and after having been most painfully bundled out (赶，匆忙打发) into the snow a hundred miles from Kansas City in the gray of a winter morning, and at the same time relieved of his watch and overcoat by two brakemen who had found him hiding in the car, he had picked up a Kansas City paper—The Star—only to realize that his worst fear in regard to all that had occurred had come true. For there, under a two-column head, and with fully a column and a half of reading matter below, was the full story of all that had happened: a little girl, the eleven-year-old daughter of a well-to-do (小康的) Kansas City family, knocked down and almost instantly killed—she had died an hour later; Sparser and Miss Sipe in a hospital and under arrest at the same time, guarded by a policeman sitting in the hospital awaiting their recovery; a splendid car very seriously damaged; Sparser's father, in the absence of the owner of the car for whom he worked, at once incensed (激怒) and made terribly unhappy by the folly and seeming criminality (犯罪行为) and recklessness of his son. (6) But what was worse, the unfortunate Sparser had already been charged with larceny (盗窃) and homicide (杀人), and wishing, no doubt, to minimize his own share in this grave catastrophe, had not only revealed the names of all who were with him in the car—the youths in particular and their hotel address—but had charged that they along with him were equally guilty, since they had urged him to make speed at the time and against his will—a claim which was true enough, as Clyde knew. And Mr. Squires, on being interviewed at the hotel, had furnished the police and the newspapers with the names of their parents and their home addresses. (7) This last was the sharpest blow of all. For there followed disturbing pictures of how their respective parents or relatives had taken it on being informed of their sins. (本文选自An American Tragedy) Passage Two (1) More and more of the world is working in English. Multinational companies (even those based in places such as Switzerland or Japan) are making it their corporate language. And international bodies like the European Union and the United Nations are doing an ever-greater share of business in the world's new default language. At the office, it's English's world, and every other language is just living in it. (2) Is this to the English-speaker's advantage? Working in a foreign language is certainly hard. It is easier to argue fluently or to make a point subtly when not trying to call up rarely used vocabulary or construct sentences correctly. English-speakers can try to bulldoze opposing arguments through sheer verbiage (冗词), hold the floor to prevent anyone else from getting a word in or lighten the mood with a joke. All of these things are far harder in a foreign language. Non-natives have not one hand, but perhaps a bit of their brains, tied behind their backs. A recent column by Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times says that it's important for native English-speakers to learn the skills of talking with non-natives successfully. (3) But, as Mr Skapinker notes, there are advantages to being a non-native, too. These are subtler—but far from trivial. Non-native speakers may not be able to show off their brilliance easily. It can be an advantage to have your cleverness highly rated, and this is the luck of verbally fluent people around the world. But it is quite often the other way round: it can be a boon to be thought a little dimmer than you really are, giving the element of surprise in a negotiation. And, as an American professor in France tells Johnson, coming from another culture—not just another language—allows people to notice stumbling blocks and habits of thinking shared by the rest of the natives, and guide a meeting past them. Such heterodox (非正统的) thinking can be wrapped in a bit of disingenuous cluelessness: 'I'm not sure how things work here, but I was thinking...' (4) People working in a language not their own report other perks. Asking for a clarification can buy valuable time or be a useful distraction, says a Russian working at The Economist. Speaking slowly allows a non-native to choose just the right word—something most people don't do when they are excited and emotional. There is a lot to be said for thinking faster than you can speak, rather than the other way round. (5) Most intriguingly, there may be a feedback loop (反馈回路) from speech back into thought. Ingenious researchers have found that sometimes decision-making in a foreign language is actually better. Researchers at the University of Chicago gave subjects a test with certain traps—easy-looking 'right' answers that turned out to be wrong. Those taking it in a second language were more likely to avoid the trap and choose the right answer. Fluid thinking, in other words, has its downside, and deliberateness (审慎) an advantage. And one of the same researchers found that even in moral decision-making—such as whether it would be acceptable to kill someone with your own hands to save a larger number of lives—people thought in a more utilitarian (功利的), less emotional way when tested in a foreign language. An American working in Denmark says he insisted on having salary negotiations in Danish—asking for more in English was excruciating to him. (6) All this applies regardless of the first language. But in the modem world it is English monoglots (只懂一种语言的人) in particular who work in their own language, joined by non-native polyglots (通晓数种语言人) working in English too. Those non-native speakers can always go away and speak their languages privately before rejoining the English conversation. Hopping from language to language is a constant reminder of how others might see things differently, notes a Dutch official at the European Commission. (One study found that bilingual children were better at guessing what was in other people's heads, perhaps because they were constantly monitoring who in their world spoke what language.) It was said that Ginger Rogers had to do every step Fred Astaire did, but 'backwards, and in high heels'. This, unsurprisingly, made her an outstanding dancer. (7) Indeed, those working in foreign languages are keen to talk about these advantages and disadvantages. Alas, monoglots will never have that chance. Pity those struggling in a second language—but also spare a thought for those many monoglots who have no way of knowing what they are missing. (本文选自The Economist) Passage Three (1) Have you ever thought about what happens to your employees right before they get to work? Sometimes we all wake up on the wrong side of the bed and just find it hard to get our bearings. At other times, we might start out fine, but have a horrible commute or a screaming match with a teenager just before going to work. Paying attention to the morning moods of your employees can pay dividends. In my research with Steffanie Wilk, an associate professor at the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University, we found that this start-of-the-day mood can last longer than you might think—and have an important effect on job performance. (2) In our study, 'Waking Up On The Right Or Wrong Side Of The Bed: Start-Of-Workday Mood, Work Events, Employee Affect, And Performance', we examined customer service representatives (CSRs) in an insurance company's call center over several weeks. We sent CSRs periodic short surveys throughout the day. We studied their mood as they started the day, how they viewed work events such as customer interactions throughout the day, and their mood during the day after these customer interactions. We used the company's detailed performance metrics to investigate how their mood at work related to their performance. (3) We found that CSRs varied from day to day in their start-of-day mood, but that those who started out each day happy or calm usually stayed that way throughout the day, and interacting with customers tended to further enhance their mood. By contrast, for the most part, people who started the day in a terrible mood didn't really climb out of it, and felt even worse by the end of the day—even after interacting with positive customers. (4) One interesting (and counterintuitive) finding was something we called 'misery loves company.' Some CSRs who felt badly as they started the day actually felt less badly after interacting with customers who were themselves in a bad mood. Perhaps this was because, by taking their customers' perspectives, these CSRs realized their own lives were not so terrible. (5) Most importantly, we discovered strong performance effects when it came to quality of work and productivity. Employees who were in a positive mood provided higher-quality service: they were more articulate on the phone with fewer 'ums' and verbal tics, and used more proper grammar. Employees who were in a negative mood tended to take more frequent breaks from their duties to cope with the stress and get themselves through the day. These small breaks piled up, leading to a greater than 10% loss of productivity. (6) How can managers use these findings to help employees cope with stress and boost performance? While it can be difficult, it is not impossible to hit the reset button and try to help employees shake a negative morning mood. For example, managers might send out morale-boosting (鼓舞士气的) messages in the morning, or hold a regular team huddle to help people transition and experience positive mood as they start their workday. Feeding people and celebrating accomplishments is always a morale booster as well. Alternatively, managers can allow employees a little space first thing in the morning, for example to chat with colleagues before an early meeting. People also need time to 'recover' from the night before so managers may want to think twice before launching a late-night barrage (轰炸) of e-mails as this might set employees up for a bad start to the next day. And if an employee arrives a few minutes late, confronting him or her about it later on instead of immediately may yield a more productive conversation and a more productive workday. (7) Employees, for their part, may want to take steps to lose their own negativity before arriving at work, creating their own 'intentional transition'. This might involve taking a different route to work, giving themselves a pep talk, stopping for coffee, or listening to inspiring music. Finally, the best thing they can do is take a deep breath before walking in the door, to focus on making the most of the new day. (本文选自Harvard Business Review)

单选题 A. excessively B. collectively C. positive D. automate E. adoption F. embed G. respective H. pollutants I. degradation J. neutralize K. pervasive L. additive M. baffle N. bind O. available What if clothing was more than just an accessory? The green movement is not new to fashion, and many designers and manufacturers have been actively seeking out ways to ensure their garments have less of an environmental impact. But what if your clothes were actually able to have a 42 impact on the environment? This vision is one shared by the two founders of Catalytic Clothing(触媒服装): Professor Tony Ryan, a scientist from the University of Sheffield, and Professor Helen Storey, a designer and artist from the London College of Fashion. Together they are working on a project that draws on the growing field of nanotechnology(纳米技术) to create a fabric 43 that can break down pollutants in the air. 'In a sense, it's a recycling of an existing technology that exists in toothpaste and sunscreen,' Professor Storey explains. The additive contains nanoparticles of titanium dioxide which act as a catalyst (触媒剂；催化剂). When light hits these particles, they react with oxygen to make what is essentially a peroxide(过氧化物) bleach. This in turn reacts with air 44 such as nitric oxide and breaks them down. While this technology could be used to create an entirely new fabric, Professor Ryan thinks that it has greater potential as an additive. 'It only needs to be on the surface,' he says. 'You don't 45 it in the fibers, and that means that it's really easy to upgrade existing fabrics with the technology. We think the best way to do this is via the laundry, because everyone washes their clothes.' Jeans have been a particular focus of Catalytic Clothing, both because they are widely prevalent as well as that the particles 46 especially well to cotton denim. And while the amount of air pollutants broken down by any one individual wearing catalyzed jeans is minor, ' 47 , we can have a huge impact on the quality of the air and therefore respiratory health,' Storey says. According to Ryan, 4 people wearing catalyzed jeans in a day would 48 the nitric oxide air pollution created by one car. The future might be one in which this pollution-busting fabric additive is so 49 that we no longer give it a second thought, like fluoride(氟化物) in tap water. Though at the moment it's not commercially 50 , Ryan estimates that it could be with in a year or class. Catalytic Clothing is aiming for mass 51 . The day is near when we'll be able to make our clothes work for us in more ways than one.

单选题 Which of the following sentences is INCORRECT?

单选题 In Beijing, the best season of the year is probably ______ fall.

单选题 The relationship between dream life and waking life has been studied ______.