单选题According to the text, the ivory-billed woodpecker ______.

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单选题Bunyan's most important work is ______, written in the old-fashioned, medieval form of allegory and dream.

单选题Which of the following is the typical case of commissives?

单选题The underlined term "natural law" as it appears in the middle of the second paragraph refers to _______.

单选题Channel Tunnel separates the island of Great Britain from[A] Denmark.[B] Belgium.[C] France.[D] the Netherlands.

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单选题Ricci's "Operation Columbus" Ricci, 45, is now striking out on perhaps his boldest venture yet. He plans to market an English - language edition of his elegant monthly art magazine, FMR, in the United States. Once again the skeptics are murmuring that the successful Ricci has headed for a big fall. And once again Ricci intends to prove them wrong. Ricci is so confident that he has christened his quest "Operation Columbus" and has set his sights on discovering an American readership of 300,000. That goal may not be too far -fetched. The Italian edition of FMR -- the initials, of course, stand for Franco Maria Ricci -- is only 18 months old. But it is already the second largest art magazine in the world, with a circulation of 65,000 and a profit margin of US' 500, 000. The American edition will be patterned after the Italian version, with each 160 -page issue carrying only 40 pages of ads and no more than five articles. But the contents will often differ. The English - language edition will include more American works, Ricci says, to help Americans get over "an inferiority complex about their art. " He also hopes that the magazine wilt become a vehicle for a two - way cultural exchange -- what he likes to think of as a marriage of brains, culture and taste from both sides of the Atlantic. To realize this vision, Ricci is mounting one of the most lavish, enterprising -- and expensive -- promotional campaigns in magazine - publishing history. Between November and January, eight jumbo jets will fly 8 million copies of a sample 16 - page edition of FMR across the Atlantic. From a warehouse in Michigan, 6.5 million copies will be mailed to American subscribers of various cultural, art and business magazines. Some of the remaining copies will circulate as a special Sunday supplement in the New York Times. The cost of launching Operation Columbus is a staggering US' 5 million, but Ricci is hoping that 60% of the price tag will be financed by Italian corporations. "To land in America Columbus had to use Spanish sponsors," reads one sentence in his promotional pamphlet. "We would like Italians. " Like Columbus, Ricci cannot know what his reception will be on foreign shores. In Italy he gambled -- and won -- on a simple concept: it is more important to show art than to write about it. Hence, one issue of FMR might feature 32 full- color pages of 17th -century tapestries, followed by 14 pages of outrageous eyeglasses. He is gambling that the concept is exportable. "I don't expect that more than 30% of my readers ... will actually read FMR," he says. "The magazine is such a visual delight that they don't have to. " Still, he is lining up an impressive stable of writers and professors for the American edition, including Noam Chomsky, Anthony Burgess, Eric Jong and Norman Mailer. In addition, he seems to be pursuing his own eclectic vision without giving a moment's thought to such established competitors as Connoisseur and Horizon. "The Americans can do almost everything better than we can," says Ricci, "But we (the Italians) have a 2,000 year edge on them in art. /

单选题Not so long ago television was scary. It was held to turn children into imbeciles, make men violent and corrupt political discourse. Books tried to alert people to the menace in their living rooms: the best of them was Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985. Musicians vilified TV in songs like "She Watch Channel Zero" and "Television, the Drug of the Nation". These clays newspapers are filled with tales of Facebook stalkers, Craigslist killers, cyber-bullying and screen addiction. E-mail, bogs and YouTube, not television, are held responsible for the degradation of politics. As the Internet grabs attention, television has become more pitied than feared. A Google search on the phrase "threat from television" turns up some 500 results, many of them historical. "Threat to television" generates eight times as many. Much of this is misguided. People spend more time watching television now than they did when rappers attacked it with songs. As a thorough study by the Council for Research Excellence has shown, Americans spend more time watching television than they spend surfing the web, sending e-mails, watching DVDs, playing computer games, reading newspapers and talking on mobile phones put together. Television is not disappearing. But nor is it the only star in the sky. The Internet, both fixed and mobile, poses a growing challenge to television. It lures advertisers with promises of precision: why pay huge sums to scatter a message among millions of people when you can target the few who seem to be interested in your product? To consumers it promises choice, engagement and a low (or no) price. And the Internet has powerful backers. Despite all that hand-wringing over the dangers of technology, governments from South Korea to Sweden seem to regard universal fast broadband as a human right, to be paid for out of general taxation. With the important exception of sport, early attempts to deliver TV content over the web and mobile phones have proved unprofitable. The worst mistakes are now being put right. But it is doubtful that the economics of online or mobile video will ever be as attractive as the economics of traditional television. As video goes online, a world of restricted choice and limited advertising space turns into one where both are available in almost endless quantities. More supply means lower prices. Technology also competes for attention. Although families still gather around the TV set as they have done for decades, they now bring electronic distractions with them. Nielsen reckons that 13% of people who watched the Academy Awards ceremony this year went online during the programmed, up from 9% last year. The multitask did not appear to gravitate to entertainment websites. Google and Facebook topped the list of websites visited during the Oscars, just as they did during the Super Bowl and the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. For the biggest TV shows, technology is a boon. Social-networking websites create chatter around reality-TV programmers, increasing awareness and drawing viewers. Television executives have long endeavored to create "water-cooler" shows which people will talk about at work the next day. Chris Silverman, president of International Creative Management, a talent agency, says Facebook and Twitter function a bit like large digital water-coolers. As audiences fragment, the big shows' ability to draw huge numbers of eyeballs at a specific time becomes ever more valuable to advertisers. For shows of middling popularity, including many scripted dramas and comedies, life is harder. Big shows are crowding out smaller ones, partly because of the amplifying effects of social media and partly because of the spread of digital video recorders, which make it easy to watch nothing but hits. Online video nibbles at their audience, too. How to survive in this world of giant competitors and new distractions? One answer is to involve viewers more in programmers. Television is extremely good at creating characters and gripping stories. It is much less good at encouraging people to engage with those stories. Simon Cowbell has proved that people will vote for contestants in talent shows. Television is supreme at holding the attention of a large number of people for long periods. Other gadgets divert people from the box, but not nearly as much as TV diverts them from all those other gadgets. And technology has undermined some of television's biggest competitors, notably newspapers. In a world of fragmenting audiences, if TV can combine scale with specificity, become more responsive to its audience and learn to aim adverts more precisely, it will continue to thrive.

单选题{{B}}TEXT C{{/B}} Growing concerns over the safety and efficacy of anti-depressant drugs prescribed to children have caught the eye of Congress and the New York state attorney general. Now they're becoming the catalyst for calls to reform the way clinical trials of all drugs are reported. Pressure is already causing some changes within the pharmaceutical industry. And it has put the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which approves new drugs, in the hot seat. If reforms are carried out, they could bring an unprecedented level of transparency to drug research. The solution now under consideration: a public database, or registry, of drug trials, where companies would post the results of those trials. In congressional testimony Thursday, a spokesman for the American Medical Association endorsed the registry and said it should include information on each trial's purpose and objective, its design, and the dates it begins and ends. If the trial is not completed, the registry should include an explanation. While drug companies have been eager to make public any positive results of their trials, recent revelations suggest they've balked at divulging tests when the results are not what they'd hoped to see. The furor has centered around the use Of anti-depressants on children. The industry has begun to make some moves to address the concerns about drug trials. Drug companies have agreed to set up a voluntary system of posting their drug trials on the Internet. But that seems unlikely to satisfy some members of Congress, who are expected to introduce legislation to establish a mandatory drug registry. Last week, editors of a dozen influential medical journals announced that they would begin requiring drug companies to post a drug trial in a public database prior to accepting an article about it. Doctors rely on these articles to make treatment choices. The editors hope that the registry will force unfavorable drug studies, before kept secret, into the open. Medical journals already had been tightening up on the authorship of their articles, insisting that authors declare if they had any conflicts of interest, such as any financial or other ties to the drug company, says Daniel Callahan, a director at the Hastings Center, a nonprofit bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y. Information from previously undisclosed clinical trials could lower prices, reduce the number of badly designed trials, and help doctors considering the use of a drug for a non-approved purpose to know why it hasn't been approved for that use. Antidepressant drugs "have some serious side effects ... that seem to be much more common than people realize ... much more common than you might think from seeing drug ads and from reports on drug studies," says Joel Gurin, executive vice president of Consumer Reports. His magazine just finished a survey of readers showing a "dramatic shift from talk therapy to drug therapy for mental health problems" during the past decade. In 1995, less than half of people getting mental health treatment--40 percent--got drug therapy. Today 68 percent receive drug treatment, Mr. Gurin says. Some studies coming to light show that antidepressants work no better than placebos. Even better than merely registering drug trials, Caplan (director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia) suggests, would be to require that a new drug not only be "safe and do what it's supposed to do", but that it do it as well or better than other drugs already on the market. That, he says, would help push research into new areas and save money.

单选题American author ______'s book The Red Badge of Courage published in 1895 brought him international fame. A. Alex Haley B. Norman Mailer C. Stephen Crane D. John Steinbeck

单选题{{B}}TEXT B{{/B}} When the City Free Delivery Service began in America, all the letter carriers needed were their leather satchels. But, as the service continued into the 20th century, cities, populations, and commerce exploded. And before long, carders' mailbags were stuffed to the brim, and the carders overwhelmed by the volume. Carders needed a vehicle that could get them to their routes and carry the day's mail, including parcel post packages, without relays back to the post office. The introduction of the Parcel Post Service in 1913 had brought millions of packages into the mail stream for the first time. After World War 1I, the amount of mail delivered to American homes each day increased so dramatically that letter carders could no longer rely solely on pouches and handcarts to carry mail on their daily rounds. In the late 1950s, the Post Office Department began supplying carriers with three-wheeled mail vans. Known as mailsters, these tiny vans were efficient in carrying mail but uncomfortable and dangerous. Mailsters offered little protection against cold or damp weather, little traction in good weather, and often no traction in snow, and poor reliability, for they were constantly breaking down. Letter carriers were not impressed by their new vehicles, which they considered too dangerous, too flimsy, too small, too underpowered, too prone to breaking down, too impractical and too top heavy. A common complaint was that mailsters were unable to compete on the open road. They simply lacked sufficient "get up and go". This frequently resulted in back-ups, with cars lined up for blocks behind the creeping three-wheelers. The tricycle design left mailsters susceptible to tipping over if cornering over 25 mph or if caught in a high wind. One mailster was even tipped over by a large dog. The first large-scale purchase of these vehicles for letter carriers' use was in the 1950s. These funny-looking trucks could carry up to 500 pounds of mail. By the 1960s, mailsters comprised almost one-third of the postal service's vehicular fleet. While the idea behind mailstets was solid, the vans were not, and from the 1950s, Jeeps increasingly became a vital part of the Postal Service fleet because they were strong and agile.

单选题The writer of this letter attempts to __________ the views in the editorial.

单选题{{I}} Question 9 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item ,you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question. Now listen to the news.{{/I}}

单选题The unitary government system is the best choice in ______.

单选题WhatsortofchildrenattendMrs.Leech'sschool?

单选题The passage indicates that the major reason for the unusual decline of the Indian culture is______.

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单选题Economic conditions have improved during the past decade in many North American and European CBDs, primarily because of an unprecedented pace of office construction. Downtowns that were generally considered dead and beyond help as recently as the 1970s are now filled with both local residents and tourists, even during evenings and weekends when offices are closed. The new downtown offices, shops, and recreation facilities provide cities with additional tax revenues that can be used to maintain essential services. The underclass The atmosphere of animation and prosperity found in many CBDs does not extend to the surrounding residential areas. With the exception of a handful of renovated neighborhoods, the zone in transition is inhabited by large numbers of persons who are frequently referred to as a permanent underclass. These inner-city residents are increasingly trapped in an unending cycle of economic and social problems and are not able to share in the revival of the CBDs. The underclass suffers from relatively high rates of unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, illiteracy, juvenile delinquency, and crime. For them, schools have deteriorated, and affordable housing is increasingly difficult to find. Neighborhoods lack adequate police protection, fire services, and shops, as well as hospitals, clinics, and other health-care facilities. Future prospects are especially bleak for the underclass because they are increasingly unable to compete for jobs. Inner-city residents lack the technical skills needed to obtain most jobs, because fewer than half complete high school. The gap between the skills typically demanded by employers and the training of inner-city residents is getting much larger. In the past, people with limited education could become factory workers or filing clerks, but today these jobs require knowledge of computing and handling electronics. Meanwhile, inner-city residents don't even have access to the remaining low-skilled jobs, such as janitors and fast-food servers, which are increasingly located in the suburbs. Fiscal problems. The concentration of low-income minority residents in the central cities has produced financial problems. Despite higher taxes generated by new CBD projects, central cities face a growing gap between the cost of needed services and the availability of funds to pay for them. The percentage of people below the poverty level living in U.S. central cities increased during the 1980s and is more than twice as high as in the suburbs. Since 1950, overall population has declined by more than 40 percent in the central cities of Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis, and by more than one-fourth in a number of other cities. The number of tax-paying middle-class families and industries has invariably declined by higher percentages in these cities. A city has two choices to close the gap between the cost of services and the amount of available taxes. One alternative is to raise taxes, a move that could drive remaining wealthier people and industries from the city. The other alternative is to reduce services by closing libraries, eliminating some public-transit routes, collecting trash less frequently, and delaying replacement of outdated school equipment. Aside from the hardship imposed on those laid off from work, cutbacks in public services could also encourage middle-class residents and industries to move from the city. To avoid this dilemma, cities have increasingly sought funds from the state and federal governments. The federal government increased its share of contribution to city budgets from I percent in the 1950s to 25 percent in the early 1980s. Since the early 1980s, though, the federal government has substantially reduced its contributions to local governments. State governments and private corporations have increased financial assistance to cities to offset partially the loss of federal funds. The high level of outside financial support has obscured the intensity of the fiscal crisis faced by cities as a result of shifting patterns of land use.

单选题{{B}}TEXT C{{/B}} Adam Smith, the Scottish professor of moral philosophy, was thrilled by his recognition of order in the economic system. His book, The Wealth of Nations (1776), is the germinal book in the field of economics which earned him the title, the father of economics. In Smith's view, a nation's wealth was dependent upon production, not agriculture alone. How much it produced, he believed, depended upon how well it combined labour and the other factors of production. The more efficient the combination, the greater the output, and the greater the nation's wealth. The essence of Smith's economic philosophy was his belief that an economy would work best if left to function on its own without government regulation. In those circumstances, self-interest would lead business firms to produce only those products that consumers wanted, and to produce them at the lowest possible cost. They would do this, not as a means of benefiting society, but in an effort to outperform their competitors and gain the greatest profit. But all this self-interest would benefit society as a whole by providing it with more and better goods and services, at the lowest prices. Smith said in his book: "Every individual endeavours to employ his capital so that its produce may be of greatest value. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own security, only his own gain. And he is in this led by an 'invisible hand' to promote that which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote." The "invisible hand" was Smith's name for the economic forces that we today would call supply and demand, Smith agreed with the physiocrats and their policy of "laissez faire", letting individuals and businesses function without interference from government regulation. In that way the "invisible hand" would be free to guide the economy and maximize production. Smith was very critical of monopolies which restricted the competition that he saw as vital for economic prosperity. He recognized that the virtues of the market mechanism are fully realized only when the checks and balances of perfect competition are present. Perfect competition refers to a market in which no firm or consumer is large enough to affect the market price. The "invisible hand" theory is about economies in which all the markets are perfectly competitive. In such circumstances, markets will produce an efficient allocation of resources, so that an economy is on its production-possibility frontier. When all industries are subject to the checks and balances of perfect competition, markets can produce an efficient bundle of products with the most efficient techniques and using the minimum amount of inputs. But when monopolies become pervasive, the remarkable efficiency properties of the invisible hand may be destroyed.