单选题Many things make people think artists are weird—the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. But the weirdest may be this: artists' only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. Art today can give you anomie, no problem. Bittersweetness? You got it. Tristesse? What size you want that in? But great art, as defined by those in the great-art-defining business, is almost never about simple, unironic happiness. This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring—in Tolstoy's words, "All happy families are alike." We went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling. Artists who focused on making their audiences feel good, from Usher to Thomas Kinkade, were labeled "pop". Sure, there have been exceptions (say, Matisse's The Dance), but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed the Ode to Joy. In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite piece of his ultra-violent antihero. If someone titles an art movie Happiness, it is a good bet that it will be—as the 1998 Todd Solondz film was—about deeply unhappy people, including a telephone pervert and a pedophile. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modem times have seen such misery. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modem form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked gruelingly, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. On top of all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, are all smiling, smiling, smiling, except for that guy who keeps losing loans to Ditech. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. (Tolstoy clearly never edited a shelter mag.) And since these messages have an agenda—to pry our wallets from our pockets—they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. It gets exhausting, this constant goad to joy. If you're not smiling—after we made all those wonderful pills and cell-phone plans!—what's wrong with you? Not to smile is un-American. You can pick out the Americans in a crowd of tourists by their reflexive grins. The U.S. enshrined in its founding document the right to the pursuit of happiness. So we pursued it and—at least as commerce defines it—we caught it. Now, like the dog that chased and finally caught the car, we don't know what the hell to do with it. We feel vaguely dissatisfied though we have what we should want, vaguely guilty for wanting it, vaguely angry because it didn't come as advertised. People tsk-tsked over last month's study in which women reported being happier watching TV than playing with their kids. But why shouldn't they? This is how the market defines happiness. Happiness is feeling good. Kids, those who exist outside ads, make you feel bad—exhausted, frustrated, bored and poor. Then they move away and break your heart. What we forget—what our economy depends on us forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure sans pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is O.K. not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine-connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Noir. We need art to tell us: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.

单选题In more than five hundred poems she had written about nature, Dickinson expressed her ______ about the relationship between man and nature.A. hatredB. agreementC. loveD. skepticism

单选题High in a smooth ocean of sky floated a dazzling, majestic sun. Fragments of powdery cloud, like spray flung from a wave crest, sprinkled the radiant, lake-blue heaven. Relaxed on a bundle of hay in a comer of a meadow bathed in sunlight, Paul lay dreaming. A gentle breeze was stirring the surrounding hedges; bees moved, humming thoughtfully, from scarlet poppy to purple thistle; a distant lark, invisible in blue light, was flooding the vast realm of the sky with glorious song, as the sun was flooding the earth with brilliance. Beyond the hedge a brook tinkled over softly-glowing pebbles. Butterflies hovered above nodding clover. An ant was busily exploring the uncharted territory of Paul"s suntanned wrist. A grasshopper skidded briskly over his ankle. And the blazing sun was steadily scorching his fair freckled face to bright lobster red. Neither sun, nor grasshopper, nor ant, however, was able to arouse him. Not even when a fly started crawling over his face did he open his eyes. For Paul was a thousand miles away, in a world of eternal snow and ice. Across the towering mountain range, a bitter gale was screaming furiously as with one hand he gripped a projecting knob of rock while with his axe he hacked out the next narrow foothold in the rock. As their infallible guide, he was leading his gallant party of climbers up a treacherous, vertical wall of rock towards the lofty peak above, hitherto unconquered by man. A single slip, however trivial, would probably result in death for all of them. To his right he could glimpse the furrowed glacier sweeping towards the valley, but he was far too absorbed in his task to appreciate fully the scene around or even to be aware of a view of almost unearthly beauty. A sudden gust of wind nearly tore him from the ledge where he was perched. Gradually he raised his foot, tested the new foothold on the sheer rock wall, transferred his weight, and signaled to the climbers below. Not until a tractor started working in the next field did he become conscious of his far from icy surroundings. He sat up, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, glanced at his watch and sighed in resignation. He had a headache through sleeping in the hot sun, a pain in his shoulder from carrying his rucksack; his legs felt stiff and his feet ached. With no enthusiasm whatever he pulled the bulging rucksack over his shoulders and drew a large-scale map from his pocket. At the far end of the meadow two slates in the wall, which at this point replaced the hedge, indicated a stile, and beyond he could faintly see a thin thread of path which dwindled and finally disappeared as it climbed the steep slope of the down, quivering in the glare of the sun. The whole of Nature seemed to be luxuriating in warmth, sunshine and peace. Wherever he looked, leaves on twigs, grass blades, flower petals, all were sparkling in sunlight. Fifteen miles off, over the ridge, across a broad valley and then over a higher, even steeper range of hills lay the youth hostel: supper, company, a cool dip in the river. With a momentary intense longing for ice-axe, blizzard, glacier and heroic exploit (none of which was at all familiar to him), Paul strode off unwillingly to less dramatic but equally heroic achievement in the tropical heat of an English sun.

单选题WhatsortofchildrenattendMrs.Leechesschool?

单选题Christopher Columbus was a(n) ______ navigator. A. British B. Spanish C. Portuguese D. Italian

单选题The author maintains that fantasies ______.

单选题Who is the head of state in Ireland today?A. The Queen. B. The prime minister.C. The president. D. The Dai.

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单选题When I decided to quit my full time employment it never occurred to me that I might become a part of a new international trend. A lateral move that hurt my pride and blocked my professional progress prompted me to abandon my relatively high profile career although, in the manner of a disgraced government minister, l covered my exit by claiming "I wanted to spend more time with my family". Curiously, some two-and-a-half years and two novels later, my experiment in what the Americans term "downshifting" has turned my tired excuse into an absolute reality. I have been transformed from a passionate advocate of the philosophy of "having it all", preached by Linda Kelsey for the past seven years in the page of She magazine, into a woman who is happy to settle for a bit of everything. I have discovered, as perhaps Kelsey will after her much-publicized resignation from the editorship of She after a build-up of stress, that abandoning the doctrine of "juggling your life", and making the alternative move into "downshifting" brings with it far greater rewards than financial success and social status. Nothing could persuade me to return to the kind of life Kelsey used to advocate and I once enjoyed: 12 hour working days, pressured deadlines, the fearful strain of office politics and the limitations of being a parent on "quality time" . In America, the move away from juggling to a simpler, less materialistic lifestyle is a well-established trend. Down shifting—also known in America as "voluntary simplicity" — has, ironically, even bred a new area of what might be termed anticonsumerism. There are a number of best-selling downshifting self-help books for people who want to simplify their lives; there am newsletters, such as The Tightwad Gazette, that give hundreds of thousands of Americans useful tips on anything from recycling their cling-film to making their own soap; there are even support groups for those who want to achieve the mid-90's equivalent of dropping out. While in America the trend started as a reaction to the economic decline—after the mass redundancies caused by downsizing in the late 80's—and is still linked to the politics of thrift, in Britain, at least among the middle-class downshifters of my acquaintance, we have different reasons for seeking to simplify our lives. For the women of my generation who were urged to keep juggling through the 80's, downshifting in the mid-90's is not so much a search for the mythical good life—growing your own organic vegetables, and risking turning into one—as a personal recognition of your limitations.

单选题Semantic triangle is made up of reference, symbol and ______. A. referent B. meaning C. thought D. words or phrases

单选题As people age, their cells become less efficient and less able to replace damaged components. At the same time their tissues stiffen. For example, the lungs and the heart muscle expand less successfully, the blood vessels become increasingly rigid, and the ligaments and tendons tighten. Few investigators would attribute such diverse effects to a single cause. Nevertheless, researchers have discovered that a process long known to discolor and toughen foods may also contribute to age-related impairment of both cells and tissues. That process is nonenzymatic glycosylation, whereby glucose becomes attached to proteins without the aid of enzymes. When enzymes attach glucose to proteins (enzymatic glycosylation), they do so at a specific site on a specific protein molecule for a specific purpose. In contrast, the nonenzymatic process adds glucose haphazardly to any of several sites along any available peptide chain within a protein molecule This nonenzymatic glycosylation of certain proteins has been understood by food chemists for decades, although few biologists recognized until recently that the same steps could take place in the body. Nonenzymatic glycosylation begins when an aldehyde group (CHO) of glucose and an amino group (NH2) of a protein are attracted to each other. The molecules combine, forming what is called a Schiff base within the protein. This combination is unstable and quickly rearranges itself into a stabler, but still reversible, substance known as an Amadori product. If a given protein persists in the body for months or years, some of its Amadori products slowly dehydrate and rearrange themselves yet again, into new glucose-derived structures. These can combine with various kinds of molecules to form irreversible structures named advanced glycosylation end products (AGE's). Most AGE's are yellowish brown and fluorescent and have specific spectrographic properties. More important for the body, many are also able to cross-link adjacent proteins, particularly ones that give structure to tissues and organs. Although no one has yet satisfactorily described the origin of all such bridges between proteins, many investigators agree that extensive cross-linking of proteins probably contributes to the stiffening and loss of elasticity characteristic of aging tissues. In an attempt to link this process with the development of cataracts (the browning and clouding of the lens of the eye as people age), researchers studied the effect of glucose on solutions of purified crystallin, the major protein in the lens of the eye. Glucose-free solutions remained clear, but solutions with glucose caused the proteins to form clusters, suggesting that the molecules had become cross-linked. The clusters diffracted light, making the solution opaque. The researchers also discovered that the pigmented cross-links in human cataracts have the brownish color and fluorescence characteristic of AGE's. These data suggest that nonenzymatic glycosylation of tens crystallins may contribute to cataract formation. (454)

单选题Mike Tyson was put in prison last August because he ______.

单选题The general election of New Zealand has been held______since 1879. A. every two years B. every three years C. every four years D. every five years

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单选题 Question 10 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given I0 seconds to answer the question. Now listen to the news.

单选题Nike'sfirstimpressionofHongKongwas______.

单选题In general, children have virtually acquired the basic fabric of their native language at the age of ______.A. three or four B. five or six C. seven or eight D. nine or ten

单选题Every morning at four-thirty, sixty concrete trucks—from Brooklyn, from Queens, from New Jersey— race in the dark over bridges and through tunnels and converge at the intersection of West and Verse Streets, where One World Trade Center is going up. Concrete is perishable, A load will spoil in ninety minutes once it has left the hatching plant. The trucks pull up to the construction site. They dump their loads into big baskets with hydraulic pumping systems. Eleven thousand three hundred tons of superstructure steel are waiting. The other day, Chris Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority, which is supervising the project, stood three hundred feet in the air, on what will be the twentieth of One World Trade Center's hundred and four floors, and said, "This site will be understood by the public on how well this tower rises, but the real metric is how quickly the concrete gets poured. " Toward the building's core, where office workers will one day ride elevators, members of Local 46 of the Metallic Lathers and Reinforcing Ironworkers union were torch-cutting rebar. Sparks flew. Below, tiny fluorescent-vested figures trundled dollies and hoisted planks in what looked like a scene from "Fraggle Rock. " Ward, who is fifty-five, took the Port Authority job in May of 2008. He inherited a huge, politically impossible mess: nineteen public agencies, two developers, a hundred and one contractors, and thirty-three architects have stakes in the World Trade Center redevelopment project. Ward's first act was to order a reevaluation of the plans for the site. Thanks to him, a memorial will be completed in time for the tenth anniversary of September 11th—sooner than it might have been, but, for a lot of people, not soon enough. Ward wears a blue suit and speaks like a technocrat, but his handshake is a crusher and he knows his girders. He didn't like the name Freedom Tower—as One World Trade Center was originally called—any more than anyone else did. He said, "That sense that New York needs a new downtown, that we need to defeat the terrorists—was it inevitable, that language? I don't know, but I can understand why it happened. " He is concerned that large-scale, sentimental thinking—"monumentalism," he calls it—has paralyzed the rebuilding process. "The political rhetoric, the sense that New York had to do everything huge at one time, obscured the construction reality," he said. He pointed out some steel bundles, dangling from a crane, and explained how the speeded-up schedule for the memorial affected the sequencing of PATH service, which affected the building of the "1 box"—the pod that encases the tracks of the No. 1 train, which runs directly through the site—which, in turn, affected the building of Larry Silverstein's Three World Trade Center. To Ward, the site is a delicate, mutating mesh of counterweighted considerations—a high-stakes game of pickup sticks. New York is not Dubai. "People always say, 'How come One World Trade Center is taking so long? The Empire State Building was built in fifteen months,' " Ward said. "Yeah, well, people forget that five people died building the Empire State Building. " He noted that, while Dubai "can literally rip up and relocate an entire town," plans for a floating swimming-pool barge in city waters were delayed for years because of red tape. Walking, on ground level, through dirt and nails—but little garbage—he spotted the looming jackknife of the new Goldman Sachs tower, at 200 West Street. "People say, 'This Goldman Sachs building got built in four years. Why is One World Trade Center taking so long? ' Well, one reason is that this is getting built on top of a PATH train, and Goldman Sachs got built on top of a fucking parking lot !" The memorial is starting to come together. Standing on a concrete platform facing north, you can envision water gushing from spigots, which have been provisionally duct-taped in place, and rushing down thirty-foot granite walls into a pair of reflecting pools. The other day, workers were affixing slabs of granite to the wails. In mid-May, construction on One World Trade Center reached the twentieth floor, or what is called the "typical office floor"—the point beyond which the rest of the stories are easily replicated—and the hope is that, from now on, the building will rise about a floor every ten days. "It's thrilling when you see it, but it's nerve-racking," Ward said. "The margin for error in this town is tough. /

单选题{{B}}TEXT C{{/B}} For a long time we have worked hard at isolating the individual family. This has increased the mobility of individuals; and by encouraging young families to break away from the older generation and the home community, we have been able to speed up the acceptance of change and the rapid spread of innovative behavior. But at the same time we have burdened every small family with tremendous responsibilities once shared within three generations and among a large number of people—the nurturing of small children, the initiation of adolescents into adulthood, and care of the sick and disabled and the protection of the aged. What we have failed to realize is that even as we have separated the single family from the larger society, we have expected each couple to take on a range of obligations that traditionally have been shared within a family and a wider community. So all over the world there are millions of families left alone, as it were, each in its own box—parents faced with the specter of what may happen if either one gets sick, children fearful that their parent's may end their quarrels with divorce, and empty-handed old people without any role in the life of the next generation. Then, having reduced little by little to almost nothing the relationship between families and the community, when families get into trouble because they Cannot accomplish the impossible, we turn their problems over to impersonal social agencies, which can act only in a fragmented way because they are limited to patchwork programs that often are too late to accomplish what is most needed. Individuals and families do get some kind of help, but what they learn and what those who work hard within the framework of social agencies convey, even as they try to help, is that families should be able to care for themselves.

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