单选题BPassage 2/B 　　If you look closely at some of the early copies of the Declaration of Independence, beyond the flourished signature of John Hancock and the other 55 men who signed it, you will also find the name of one woman, Mary Katherine Goddard. It was she, a Baltimore printer, who published the first official copies of the Declaration, the first copies that included the names of its signers and therefore heralded the support of all thirteen colonies.　　Mary Goddard first got into printing at the age of twenty-four when her brother opened a printing shop in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1762. When he proceeded to get into trouble with his partners and creditors, it was Mary Goddard and her mother who were left to run the shop. In 1765 they began publishing the Providence Gazette, a weekly newspaper. Similar problems seemed to follow her brother as he opened businesses in Philadelphia and again in Baltimore. Each time Ms. Goddard was brought in to run the newspapers. After starting Baltimore's first newspaper, The Maryland Journal, in 1773, her brother went broke trying to organize a colonial postal service. While he was in debtor's prison, Mary Katherine Goddard's name appeared On the newspaper's masthead for the first time.　　When the Continental Congress fled there from Philadelphia in 1776, it commissioned Ms. Goddard to print the first official version of the Declaration of Independence in January 1777: After printing the documents, she herself paid the post riders to deliver the Declaration throughout the colonies.　　During the American Revolution, Mary Goddard continued to publish Baltimore's only newspaper, which one historian claimed was "second to none among the colonies". She was also the city's postmaster from 1775 to 1789—appointed by Benjamin Frankli—and is considered to be the first woman to hold a federal position.

单选题Questions 11--13 are based on the passage about vanity stamps. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11-13.

单选题John Julius Norwich is the author of more than a dozen books on Norman Sicily, the Sahara, Mount Athos and the Venetian and Byzantine empires. Yet even his immense knowledge is not euough to keep his latest chronicle--of 5, 000 years of Mediterranean history—from appearing somewhat lopsided. Lord Norwich's first test, he notes in his introduction to The Middle Sea, was to compensate for an ignorance of Spain. He records that he was fortuitously invited to dinner by "my dear friend" the Spanish ambassador to London and "a few weeks later there came an invitation for nay wife and me to spend ten days in Spain. " It is hard to believe that was all the effort he made, for he acquits himself well, even in the convoluted diplomacy that ended in the war of the Spanish succession. Lord Norwich's second task was to strike a balance over time. The Middle Sea reaches from ancient Egypt to the first world war. Like many long, chronological narratives, it becomes progressively more detailed, though it is debatable whether this is a good thing. Few people have changed the region as much as the Romans, yet their republic's five centuries get only a page more than the great siege of Gibraltar which began in 1779. Lord Norwich's final, and arguably most important, challenge is the area that is most likely to engage modern readers: the intermittent, but frequently savage, conflict between Muslims and Christians. Impatient with the notion, echoed most recently and disastrously by Pope Benedict, that the Koran sanctions the spreading of Islam by the sword, Lord Norwich is no Islamophobe. He is hostile to the Crusades and fulsome in his praise of that traditional Western schoolbook villain, Saladi. Yet his account remains disappointingly focused from Christendom outwards. It is true that Muslims do appear in his book—usually in battle—but they rarely speak. Only two items in the 170-volume bibliography are by Arab scholars and only one is by a Turk. This is unabashedly history of the old school: Eurocentric (Octavian, the author declares without irony, was the "undisputed master of the known world") and largely uninterested in what other economic, social and technological changes may have shaped events. What fires Lord Norwich is recounting the doings of princes and preachers, warriors, courtiers and courtesans. And he does it with consummate skill. He spices his nan-ative liberally with entertaining anecdotes, deft portraits and brisk judgments. Aristotle, for example, is given short shrift as "one of the most reactionary. intellectuals that ever lived". Lord Norwich's control of his vast and complex subject matter is masterly. And the subject matter itself is as colourful as history can get. No sooner have readers bidden farewell to a short, fat, dissolute sultan, Selim the Sot, than they encounter the "piratical Uskoks, a heterogeneous, but exceedingly troublesome community". Although few will resist the temptation to keep turning the pages, readers will close this monumental work exhilarated and informed, but with plenty of questions still unanswered.

单选题{{I}}Questions 14 - 16 are based on the following passage. You now have 15 seconds to read the questions 14 - 16.{{/I}}

单选题 Dr Thomas Starzl, like all the pioneers of organ transplantation, had to learn to live with failure. When he performed the world's first liver transplant 25 years ago, the patient, a three-year-old boy, died on the operating table. The next four patients didn't live long enough to get out of the hospital. But more determined than discouraged, Starzl and his colleagues went back to their lab at the University of Colorado Medical School. They devised techniques to reduce the heavy bleeding during surgery, and they worked on better ways to prevent the recipient's immune system from rejecting the organ — an ever-present risk. But the triumphs of the transplant surgeons have created yet another tragic problem: a severe shortage of donor organs. "As the results get better, more people go on the waiting lists and there's wider disparity between supply and need," says one doctor. The American Council on Transplantation estimated that on any given day 15000 Americans are waiting for organs. There is no shortage of actual organs; each year about 5000 healthy people die unexpectedly in the United States, usually in accidents. The problem is that fewer than 20 percent become donors. This trend persists despite laws designed to encourage organ recycling. Under the federal Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a person can authorize the use of his organs after death by signing a statement. Legally, the next of kin can veto these posthumous gifts, but surveys indicate that 70 to 80 percent of the public would not interfere with a family member's decision. The biggest roadblock,according to some experts,is that physicians don't ask for donations, either because they fear offending grieving survivors or because they still regard some transplant procedures as experimental. When there aren't enough organs to go around, distributing the available ones becomes a matter of deciding who will live and who will die. Once donors and potential recipients have been matched for body size and blood type,the sickest patients customarily go to the top of the local waiting list. Beyond the seriousness of the patients' condition,doctors base their choice on such criteria as the length of time the patient has been waiting, how long it will take to obtain an organ and whether the transplant team can gear up in time.

单选题From the passage we can find out that the author mainly studies ______.

单选题Various security measures are recommended EXCEPT ______.

单选题How far away you are from retirement plays a large part in how you should invest your retirement money. According to Leslie Wright of Westminster Portfolio Services Ltd., there are three stages to a long-term regular savings plan for retirement: capitalization, consolidation and conservation. In the first stage, people should be most concerned with building up their retirement savings investment. According to Wright, these investors can "take as aggressive an outlook as their nerves can stand," because at this point there is little capital to risk. The second step, consolidation, makes up the bulk of your savings plan; balance the aggressive investments with some tamer ones, to better protect your existing possessions. The final change, from consolidation to conservation, when your investments should aim to preserve the capital you have, should take place one to three years before you retire. The exact timing of all these should take current market conditions into account, although Wright warns against risky betting on future growth. "Greed must not be allowed to blind prudence," he says. Whatever vehicles you choose for your retirement share-holding, be sure to take advantage of dollar-cost averaging. By investing a fixed amount at regular intervals, you"ll be able to avoid the risk of poorly timed investments by averaging out the peaks and valleys of the market. Plus, regular contributions will let you avoid the temptation to drop out when the market falls, and to buy too much when prices are high. Those who are well along the road to retirement may have cause for concern these days. The plunging stock and property markets have shrunk savings, for retirement and otherwise; and some people have not planned for their retirement at all. You won"t be that rash, of course, but what if you"re already in mid-career and don"t have a retirement plan in place? If you don"t make some serious cuts in your spending and save heavily now, you"ll have to sacrifice in your golden years. Of course, it"s better still to get off on the right foot by starting your planning early. "No one should have to compromise his living standards when he retires," says Wright. "Retirement is a time to really enjoy life. We have all worked so hard. " And one of the things you should be working hard on right now is planning for those days of enjoyment.

单选题The doctor asked the child' s parents ______ . [A] what is the problem [B] what was the problem [C] what the problem was

单选题Some cities grow very large because of two important reasons. First, there may be important natural resources like wood, gas, oil, rivers or harbors near or in the city. Natural resources like wood or oil can be brought to the city and made into products to sell. Other resources, like rivers or harbors help to send the city's products to other places to be sold. Second, the city may be located in a place where roads and rivers come together. This makes these cities good places to buy and sell goods. Houston is a city that grew large because it has two important natural resources. They are oil and a good harbor. The oil can be brought to Houston, made into different products, and shipped out of the harbor to other parts of the world. Chicago is a city that grew very large because of its location at a place where roads, railways, and airways meet. In Chicago, goods can be brought together from all over the country and bought and sold. Then the goods can be loaded into trucks, trains or planes and sent to wherever they are needed. Because of Chicago's location, many people live and work there.

单选题You'd better ______ be late this time. A. to B. not C. not to

单选题Culture is the sum total of all the traditions, customs, belief and ways of life of a given group of human beings. In this sense, every group has a culture, however savage, undeveloped, or uncivilized it may seem to us. To the professional anthropologist, there is no intrinsic superiority of one culture over another, just as to the professional linguist there is no intrinsic hierarchy among languages. People once thought of the languages of backward groups as savage, undeveloped form of speech, consisting largely of grunts and groans. While it is possible that language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is a fact established by the study of "backward" languages that no spoken tongue answers that description today. Most languages of uncivilized groups are, by our most severe standards, extremely complex, delicate, and ingenious pieces of machinery for the transfer of ideas. They fall behind the Western languages not in their sound patterns or grammatical structures, which usually are fully adequate for all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, which reflect the objects and activities known to their speakers. Even in this department, however, two things are to be noted: 1. All languages seem to possess the machinery for vocabulary expansion, either by putting together words already in existence or by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system. 2. The objects and activities requiring names and distinctions in "backward" languages, while different from ours, are often surprisingly numerous and complicated. A western language distinguishes merely between two degrees of remoteness ("this" and "that"); some languages of the American Indians distinguish between what is close to the speaker, or the person addressed, or remote from both, or out of sight, or in the past, or in the future. This study of language, in turn, casts a new light upon the claim of the anthropologists that all cultures are to viewed independently, and without ideas of rank or hierarchy.