单选题A member of the House of Representatives and a member of the Senate serve respectively for ______ and ______ years.

单选题 {{B}}TEXT A{{/B}} The wave of job cuts sweeping through the utility sector gathered pace yesterday with 800 more redundancies planned by two electricity groups joining forces in order to meet regulator's price demands and improve efficiency. Trade unions expressed anger that the announcement by two foreign-owned utilities, London Electricity and Eastern Electricity, came during the period immediately before Christmas. They noted that it arrived on the back of nearly 1,300 other job losses in this sector since early October. Half of the 160,000 jobs in the electricity sector have gone since privatization in 1988. More than 2,000 redundancies have also been announced recently by water companies, and more are expected from United Utilities as they, too, seek to meet tougher regulatory targets. Not everyone in the industry is convinced that the current spate of job cuts in the utility sector is justified. One leading industry executive, who wanted to remain anonymous, said: "I am very concerned that companies are using the regulators' price cut as an excuse for carrying out general cuts that they have wanted to do for some time. It is causing disquiet among utilities customers." If regulatory approval is given London Electricity --a unit of Electricite de France --and Eastern Electricity, controlled by American conglomerate Texas Utilities, will form a joint venture from April 1, 2000, which will run their respective electricity distribution businesses. The companies will continue to compete on the supply and billing side of their operations but hope the new alliance will be able to win third party business, whether in electricity or other sectors such as gas. The 800 job losses mean a quarter of the jobs affected by the joint venture will be lost within 18 months, and that the remaining positions will be dependant on the general level of business activity. The two companies plan to achieve cost savings through fewer workers, having a single information system, a smaller number of buildings and buying more in bulk. Phil Turbeville, chief executive of Texas Utilities' TXS Europe subsidiary, said: "It is the responsible management response to the challenges of the tough price control while delivering further improvements in customer service." He added that customers would benefit because lower costs meant more money available for new investment, and denied that the decision could have been made at a better time or would have been different if it had not been a foreign-owned group. "Whether we told staff just before Christmas or just after it would have been the same. There is no good time to make redundancies. As you can see from what Scottish-based utilities have been doing, this is nothing to do with Paris or Texas. It is just prudent management," Mr. Turbeville said.

单选题Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher and religious thinker who was born on November 24, 1632 in Amsterdam. His family was Spanish-Portuguese Jews who were refugees to Holland. Spinoza was taught his early education from Jewish sources. He later went on to study other Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, Gersonides, and Crescas. Baruch became interested in the physical sciences and the works of Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes. As a result of his studies, he grew away from Judaism and withdrew from the synagogue. In 1656, the rabbis banished Spinoza from Amsterdam. For the next five years he lived on the outside of the city where he supported himself by grinding optical lenses. During this time, Spinoza wrote his first philosophical work Treatise on God and Man and His Happiness. This work explained and outlined a good part of Spinoza's philosophical beliefs. In 1661, Spinoza moved to Rijnsburg and a few years later he moved to Voorburg. From there he moved to the Hague. Soon after moving to the Hague, he was offered a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Spinoza declined the offer. He was afraid it might compromise his freedom of thought and speech. At this time, Baruch Spinoza was well known and was well respected for his work. King Louis XIV of France offered Spinoza a pension on the condition that he dedicate one of his works to the monarch. Again, Spinoza rejected the offer. Spinoza's work, Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order, was one of the best outlines of his theoretical framework. In this work, Spinoza divided his ethical thinking into five different parts—"On God," "On the Nature and Origin of the Mind," "On the Nature and Origin of the Emotions,' "On Human Bondage,' and "On Human Liberty". Spinoza believed that the universe is identical with God, who is the uncaused "substance" of all things. Baruch Spinoza used substance for God because he believed God was not a material reality but a basis for all things that are reality. Spinoza also stated that humans can only use two kinds of attributes of substance, thoughts and extension. With thought and extension comes parallelism. Parallelism is a theory that Spinoza developed that explained the order between the two of them. "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." Along with this theory, Spinoza believed that there was no room in the substance universe for the ignorance of one's actions. With these actions Spinoza believed the affect will change the rest of the body's power to act. It could increase or decrease the power even though God alone is the cause of those actions. Spinoza discussed the concept of "human bondage" as a natural tendency for feelings and passions to take control of life and to make individuals into slaves. He believed that the only remedy for passion was actions. If a human can clearly understand their passions they can overcome their bondage much easier. The reasoning behind the work was to lay out a program for the perfection of the human nature. Baruch had many sources for his work, but his knowledge of the work of Rene Descartes had a considerable influence on his own. He used most of Descartes vocabulary, definitions, and mathematical ways of thinking. Baruch Spinoza died on Feb. 21, 1677 from tuberculosis. He is credited for the most thorough study of Pantheism. Many poets relate to his work as inspiration for their writings.

单选题Which of the following topics is part of the study of pragmatics?A. The acquisition of grammatical rules in a second language.B. The change in the meaning of a word over time.C. The relationship between a word' s structure and its meaning,D. The uses of different types of utterances in different contexts.

单选题Thegeneralelectionwillbeheldon______.A.FridayB.WednesdayC.ThursdayD.Monday

单选题What is the main cause of unhappiness for many Americans in the writer’s view?

单选题A ______ is a mild, indirect or less offensive word or expression that replaces a taboo word or serves to avoid more direct wording that might be harsh, unpleasantly direct, or offensive, e.g. "pass away" for "die". A. euphemism B. deletion C. slang D. taboo

单选题Which of the following is a totally arbitrary one?[A] Typewriter.[B] Crack.[C] Newspaper.[D] Pig.

单选题In Charles Platt's opinion,

单选题This index is most probably taken out of a book on

单选题The construction might produce the following harmful effects EXCEPT ______.

单选题{{I}} Questions 7 and 8 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the two questions. Now listen to the news.{{/I}}

单选题According to Landes, the main reason that some countries are so poor is that ______.

单选题______ was one of the founders of modern linguistics and made a distinction between langue and parole.

单选题{{B}}TEXT B{{/B}} When a Massachusetts biotech company recently declared that its researchers had cloned human embryos, it conjured up scary images for many people: bad science-fiction movies, Hitler's twisted ambitions, rows and rows of identical humans. But, like most things in life, the truth is a lot more complicated, more subtle. The announcement drew a storm of criticism. Ethicists, religious leaders and US President Bush denounced Advanced Cell Technology for going too far. Scientists charged that the experiment was hyped and called it a failure. The news put a spotlight on the field of cloning, from work with animals to researchers' efforts to use cloning to create tissues for people suffering from debilitating and fatal diseases. At its most basic level, cloning means creating copies, and in many ways, cloning has been around a long time. When someone cuts a shoot off a green spider plant and re-pots it, that person is creating a clone. Scientists clone or copy genetic material, or DNA, to match suspects to crimes. By copying cells, researchers have been able to create and test drugs. Scientists even use cloning techniques to create copies of the human gene for insulin to help make insulin for people with diabetes. "Cloning per se is not bad. The ability to clone and make lots of copies of DNA molecules and cells is part of the entire biological revolution and all sorts of good stuff," sags Larry Goldstein, professor of cellular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. Cloning a whole animal or a human being, however, is a much more difficult proposition, even without considering the moral implications. The basic method sounds deceptively simple. Scientists allow an egg to mature in a culture dish. They strip out the genetic material from this egg. Then they insert the genetic material of a separate cell, an adult cell. Next, using a chemical mixture or electrical stimulation, researchers trick the egg into thinking it has been fertilised by sperm. This will activate the cell to start dividing. Essentially, scientists are trying to reprogramme the egg to create a new organism. It's an excruciatingly difficult process. During the past several years, scientists around the world have used this method to clone animals. They've created about a half-dozen different species, including the famous first sheep, Dolly, along with cows, mice, goats and pigs. Experts say these cloned animals could offer a great deal, from herds that produce more milk, to genetically modified animal organs that could be used for transplantation in humans, and even to cattle that lack the gene that makes them susceptible to mad cow disease. But it has been a tough process. For each species, scientists have had to work out subtle variations on the basic cloning steps, including how to treat the donor cell and what type of stimulation to use to spark the egg to start dividing. Still, fewer than 1% of these cloned embryos produce live offspring. Even those born alive have abnormalities--some become obese very quickly, some suffer neonatal respiratory failure. Those that die do so suddenly, and scientists can't figure out why. There is no consensus about what is going wrong in these experiments or why, except that something must be awry in the genetic reprogramming. But almost all scientists agree that aside from the moral debate, cloning hasn't been perfected enough to try in humans.

单选题Strong affinity to the Chinese and Oriental literature can be found in the works of ______.

单选题Tess of the Durbervilles was written by_____.

单选题The author mentions people dying of air pollution in ______.

单选题Who is Joe Brown?

单选题WhichofthefollowingisNOTincludedintheagreementtobesignedbetweenRussiaandIran?