单选题Questions 17—20 are based on the following conversation about a department store. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17—20.

单选题Read the following text. Choose the best word or phrase marked A, B, C or D for each numbered blank. Tropical rainforests are the most {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}ecosystem (生态系统) on Earth, and also the oldest. Today, tropical rainforests cover only 6 percent of the Earth's ground surface, but they arc home to over half of the planet's plant and animal {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}. These forests receive between 160 and 400 inches of rain per year. The total {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}rainfall is spread pretty {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}throughout the year, and the temperature rarely dips below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. This {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}climate is due to the position of rainforests on the globe. Since rainforests are at the middle of the globe, located near the equator, they are not especially {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}by climate change. They receive nearly the {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}amount of sunlight, and therefore heat, all year. {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}, the weather in these regions remains fairly {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}} The consistently wet, warm weather and ample sunlight give plant life everything it needs to {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Trees have the resources to grow to {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}heights, and they live for hundreds, even thousands of years. Rainforests are home to the {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}of animal species in the world. And a great number of species who now live in other environments, including humans, originally {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}the rainforests. Researchers {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}that in a large rainforest area, there may be more than 10 million different animal species. In the past hundred years, humans have begun destroying rainforests at an alarming {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Today, roughly 1.5 acres of rainforest are destroyed every second. People are cutting down the rainforests in {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}of three major resources: 1. Land for crops. 2. Lumber for paper and other wood products. 3. Land for livestock pastures. In the current economy, people obviously have a need for all of these resources. But almost all experts agree that, over time, we will suffer much more {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}the destruction of the rainforests than we will benefit. The world's rainforests are an extremely valuable natural resource, to be sure, but not for their lumber or their land. They are the main cradle of life on Earth, and they hold millions of {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}life forms that we have yet to discover. Destroying the rainforests is {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}to destroying an unknown planet—we have no idea what we're losing. If deforestation continues at its current rate, the world's tropical rainforests will be {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}out within 40 years.

单选题{{I}}Questions 17 - 20 are based on the following passage. You now have 20 seconds to read the questions 17 - 20.{{/I}}

单选题 {{I}}Questions 17 -20 are based on the following passage. You now have 20 seconds to read questions 17 -20.{{/I}}

单选题As the Tailhook sexual-assault scandal drove him into early retirement from the Navy, Admiral Frank Kelso last week sought to overhaul his image. The Navy's top officer claimed that during his nearly four years at the helm, he had helped rid the service of its tolerance for abusive attitudes toward women. If anyone treats women as did the drunken, groping aviators at the Tailhook convention two and half years ago, Kelso blustered at a press conference, "they're not going to be in this man's Navy." In fact, his legacy is a Navy still straining to accommodate women, homosexuals and members of racial minorities. At the same time, the Navy's reputation has been battered by the investigations into Tailhook and cheating by midshipmen at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Some naval officers and military experts note that the Navy's recent problems have come under a series of chiefs — from James Watkins in 1982 to Carlisle Trost in 1986 to Kelso — who arose from the aloof and secretive submarine fleet. Submarine commanders usually are trained as engineers and are not renowned for their people skills. Presiding over crews of 155 or fewer highly screened men hasn't prepared the Navy's recent leaders to grapple with modern personnel problems. Kelso and other submariners "didn't have the leadership challenges that surface-warfare officers had," agrees Senator John McCain of Arizona, a retired Navy pilot. The Navy hasn't been run by a purebred surface-ship captain — whose sailors make up the bulk of its force — since Elmo Zumwalt left the job a generation ago. "When you go a long period of time without having a surface- fleet CNO (Chief of Naval Operations), then it becomes a very serious morale problem for that vast segment of the Navy," Zumwalt says. Early speculation was that President Clinton would name Admiral Jeremy ("Mike") Boorda, a surface-warfare officer, as CNO. Unlike all 24 CNOs who came before, Boorda, a high school dropout, never attended the Naval Academy. As the Navy personnel chief from 1988 to 1991, he drafted a plan that allowed the Navy, unlike other services, to shrink dramatically without firing personnel. But an Administration official said Saturday that Clinton might prefer to keep Boorda in his sensitive Naples post, where he has been planning the possible NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs. If so, the next CNO is likely to be Admiral Charles Larson, the Pentagon's Pacific commander — a Naval Academy graduate who would be the fourth submariner in a row to run the Navy.

单选题 The big identity-theft bust last week was just a taste of what's to come. Here's how to protect your good name. HERE'S THE SCARY THING about the identity-theft ring that the Feds cracked last week: there was nothing any of its estimated 40000 victims could have done to prevent it from happening. This was an inside job, according to court documents. A lowly help-desk worker at Teledata Communications, a software firm that helps banks access credit reports online, allegedly stole passwords for those reports and sold them to a group of 20 thieves at $60 a pop. That allowed the gang to cherry-pick consumers with good credit and apply for all kinds of accounts in their names. Cost to the victims: $3 million and rising. Even scarier is that this, the largest identity-theft bust to date, is just a drop in the bit bucket. More than 700000 Americans have their credit hijacked every year. It's one of crime's biggest growth markets. A name, address and Social Security number—which can often be found on the Web—is all anybody needs to apply for a bogus line of credit. Credit companies make $1.3 trillion annually and lose less than 2% of that revenue to fraud, so there's little financial incentive for them to make the application process more secure. As it stands now, it's up to you to protect your identity. The good news is that there are plenty of steps you can take. Most credit thieves are opportunists, not well-organized gangs. A lot of them go Dumpster diving for those millions of "pre-approved" credit-card mailings that go out every day. Others steal wallets and return them, taking only a Social Security number. Shredding your junk mail and leaving your Social Security card at home can save a lot of agony later. But the most effective way to keep your identity clean is to check your credit reports once or twice a year. There are three major credit-report outfits: Equifax (at equifax. com), Trans-Union (www. transunion. come) and Experian (experian. com). All allow you to order reports online, which is a lot better than wading through voice-mail hell on their 800 lines. Of the three, I found Trans-Union's website to be the cheapest and most comprehensive—laying out state-by-state prices, rights and tips for consumers in easy-to-read fashion. If you're lucky enough to live in Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey or Vermont, you are entitled to one free report a year by law. Otherwise it's going to cost $ 8 to $14 each time. Avoid services that offer to monitor your reports year-round for about $70; that's $10 more than the going rate among thieves. If you think you're a victim of identity theft, you can ask for fraud alerts to be put on file at each of the three credit-report companies. You can also download a theft-report form at www. consumer. gov/idtheft, which, along with a local police re- port, should help when irate creditors come knocking. Just don't expect justice. That audacious help-desk worker was one of the fewer than 2% of identity thieves who are ever caught.

单选题Senator Stennis was ______ when he was shot.

单选题Which of the following is true as to the essential functions of the U.N.?

单选题 Questions 17—20 are based on the following monologue. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17—20.

单选题Fevers cause______.

单选题 America's love affair with the credit card began in 1949. When businessman Frank McNamara finished a meal in a New York restaurant and then discovered he had no cash. In those days, gasoline and store charge cards were common, but cash was standard for almost everything else. McNamara called his wife, who rushed over to bail him out. His embarrassment gave him the idea for Diners Club. Within a year some 200 people carried the world's first multi-use card. For an annual fee of $5, these card holders could charge meals at 27 restaurants in and around New York City. By the end of 1951 more than a million dollars had been charged on the growing number of cards, and the company was soon turning a profit. The problem was to persuade enough people to carry the cards. Diners Club turned to promotions. It gave away a round-the-world trip on a popular television show. The winners charged their expenses and made it "from New York to New York without a dime in their pocket". By 1955 the convenience of charging was catching on in a big way. The first to turn a profit was Bank of America's Bank Americard. Bankers from all over the country descended on its California headquarters to learn the secret of its success—so many that in 1966 Bank Americard began forming alliances with banks outside the state. Five million holiday credit card shoppers would have created a bonanza for banks, but in the dash to market, the banks had been less than cautious in assembling their lists. Some families received 15 cards. Dead people and babies got cards. Hundreds of Chicagoans discovered they could use or sell a card they "found" and by law, the person whose name appeared on it was liable for the charges—even if he or she had never requested of received the card. The disaster sparked a movement to regulate the industry. Public Law 91-508, signed by President Nixon in October 1970, prohibited issuers from sending cards to people who hadn't requested them at all but eliminated card-holder liability for charges on a card reported lost or stolen. Later, the Fair Credit Billing Act set standard procedures for resolving billing disputes. Of course, Credit cards have not only replaced cash for many purposes, but also in effect have created cash by making it instantly available virtually everywhere. Experts estimate there are from 15,000 to 19,000 different cards available in his country. So the revolution that began in 1949 with an embarrassed businessman who was out of cash now seems complete. What Alfred Bloomingdale, then president of Diners Club, predicted more than 30 years ago seems to have come true: an America where "there will be only two classes of people—those with credit and those who can't get them."

单选题The study of reading skills is as old as written language. It is believed that it was approximately 3000 to 4000 BC when the first systematic efforts were made to teach people to read and to write. Egyptian scribes were taught these skills in formal schools, but we have no knowledge of the techniques that were used by them. The modern emphasis on the scientific study of reading dates from approximately 1887 when a French scientist named Javal discovered that the visual process in reading is not the technique people had originally assumed to be. It seems to most persons that as you read along a line of print your eye moves along smoothly recognizing words and phrases, one after the other, as it moves. Javal carefully observed the eyes of persons reading and discovered two quite important things. First, the eyes, rather than moving were stopped most of the time. Second, rather than moving slowly and smoothly along a line, they moved in extremely quick jumps from one point of fixation to the next. Javal was so struck by these jumps that he called eye movements saccadic after the French word "to jump". His findings were a surprise to many persons. If you are interested in trying out Javal's experiment, watch a friend very carefully as he reads, paying particular attention to the movements of his eyes. If you want to get a clearer picture of these rapid eye movements, you might try a technique invented by Professor W. R. Miles. It is known as the Miles Peep-Hole Technique and consists of the very simple process of cutting a small hole in the center of a page of print and observing the reader through the hole. This puts your point of observation approximately where the reader is looking, and you get a very clear picture of the saccadic eye movements. The discovery of saccadic eye movements by Javal stimulated many other people to try to study in more detail the nature of the mechanical process of reading. One of the earliest techniques was an effort to record eye movements on paper by connecting a little pneumatic tube through a long series of pulleys and wires to a pen which would write on moving paper and jiggle back and forth as the eyes moved. This turued out to be a reasonable good way of finding out how many eye movements a person was making but it was quite uncomfortable for the person being tested. Another rather disturbing technique was the process of putting a spot of white material on the comer of the eye. The material was then photographed with a movie camera as the person read. During the period from 1900 to about 1920 a new technique in studying eye movements in reading came into use with the development of eye movement cameras. Another complicated set of the eye through a series and onto a spool of moving film. Early cameras of this type were extremely expensive and difficult to construct. One of the first was used at the University of Chicago, another at the University of Minnesota, and after a few years more of them were built in other institutions throughout the country. Since 1920, many modem scientists have studied the problem of accurate recordings of eye movements in reading. As a result, there are several more modem techniques in use today. Modem equipment includes highly sophisticated cameras with high-speed film, cameras in helmets which fit on the head of the reader and show a picture of what he sees as well as the location of his eye movements, and other complex film devices. One very expensive but useful price of recording equipment is an electronic device which measures the location of visual fixation by measuring the voltage across the eyeball and feeds the electronic information into a computer which plots the exact location of the center of vision. All of these mechanical, photographic, and electronic devices have given us a great deal of useful information about the reading process.