单选题Today, there are many avenues open to those who wish to continue their education. However, nearly all require some break in one"s career in order to attend school full time. Part-time education, that is, attending school at night or for one weekend a month, tends to drag the process out over time and puts the completion of a degree program out of reach of many people. Additionally, such programs require a fixed time commitment which can also impact negatively on one"s career and family time. Of the many approaches to teaching and learning, however, perhaps the most flexible and accommodating is that called distance learning. Distance learning is an educational method, which allows the students the flexibility to study at his or her own pace to achieve the academic goals, which are so necessary in today"s world. The time required to study many be set aside at the student"s convenience with due regard to all life"s other requirements. Additionally, the student may enroll in distance learning courses from virtually any place in the world, while continuing to pursue their chosen career. Tutorial assistance may be available via regular airmail, telephone, facsimile machine, teleconferencing and over the Internet. Good distance learning programs are characterized by the inclusion of a subject evaluation tool with every subject. This precludes the requirement for a student to travel away from home to take a test. Another characteristic of a good distance-learning program is the equivalence of the distance-learning course with the same subject materials as those students taking the course on the home campus. The resultant diploma or degree should also be the same whether distance learning or on-campus study is employed. The individuality of the professor/student relationship is another characteristic of a good distance-learning program. In the final analysis, a good distance learning program has a place not only for the individual students but also the corporation or business that wants to work in partnership with their employees for the educational benefit, professional development, and business growth of the organization. Sponsoring distance learning programs for their employees gives the business the advantage of retaining career-minded people while contributing to their personal and professional growth through education.

单选题Testing has replaced teaching in most public schools. My own children's school week is framed by pretests, drills, tests, and retests. They know that the best way to read a textbook is to look at the questions at the end of the chapter and then skim the text for the answers. I believe that my daughter Erica, who gets excellent marks, has never read a chapter of any of her school textbooks all the way through. And teachers are often heard to state proudly and openly that they teach to the mandated state test. Teaching to the test is a curious phenomenon. Instead of deciding what skills students ought to learn, helping students learn them, and then using some sensible methods of assessment to discover whether students have mastered the skills, teachers are encouraged to reverse the process. First one looks at a commercially available test. Then one distills the skills needed not to master reading, say, or math, but to do well on the test. Finally, the test skills are taught. The ability to read or write or calculate might imply the ability to do reasonably well on standardized tests. However, neither reading nor writing develops simply through being taught to take tests. We must be careful to avoid mistaking preparation for a test of a skill with the acquisition of that skill. Too many discussions of basic skills make this fundamental confusion because people are test obsessed rather than concerned with the nature and quality of what is taught. Recently many schools have faced what could be called the crisis of comprehension or, in simple terms, the phenomenon of students with phonic and grammar skills still being unable to understand what they read. These students are competent at test taking and filling in workbooks and ditto masters. However, they have little or no experience reading or thinking, and talking about what they read. They know the details but can't see or understand the whole. They are taught to be so concerned with grade that they have no time or ease of mind to think about meaning, and reread things if necessary.

单选题What can we learn about Saudi Arabia from Paragraph 1 ?

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Human creativeness is boundless. With the advance of science and technology, a complete new means of communication -- Mobile Phone came to the world, which, being not fixed in one place like ordinary phones, greatly facilitates telephone communication. Although using mobile phone is convenient, it also has some negative factors. It tells us that we should pay more attention to the mobile phone etiquette. There is a research on American mobile phone etiquette. People are using cell phones in a Manhattan subway. Most Americans believe that there are unspoken rules about using mobile phone etiquette, according to an online poll. It's impolite to shout down their cell phones which may frighten other passengers. Checking emails, sending text messages and making telephone calls while in the company of other passengers are definite breeches of mobile phone manners. Texting during a date is also strictly forbidden. But the majority of American people questioned in the online poll said that they would not be offended if they received an electronic "thank you", instead of a written note and seventy-five percent had no objections to anyone using laptops, net books or cell phones in the bathroom. "Etiquette is first and foremost a question of awareness," said the author and etiquette expert Anna Post. But she described the results of the Harris Interactive poll commissioned by Intel as "pretty surprising statistics". Sixty-two percent of the 2,625 adults who took part in the survey agreed that cell phones, laptops, net books and other electronic devices are part of daily life. Fifty-five percent also thought that the demands of business mean people must stay connected, even if it involves taking a laptop on a holiday or answering a cell phone during a meal. Despite the need to be constantly connected and the general acceptance of the technology, people were more sensitive about technology abuses during holiday and religious activities. Nearly ninety percent of Americans think that cell phone use is unacceptable during a religious service and thirty percent admitted they would be offended if they received an online gift wish. But more than half revealed that they intended to send an electronic greeting card, instead of a traditional one. "These are issues about common sense," said Dr Genevieve Bell, an ethnographer and director of Intel's User Experience Group, adding that the social rules of when and how it is appropriate to use the technology are still being formed.

单选题It can be inferred from the passage that China fall behind South Africa because ______.

单选题{{B}}Passage 2{{/B}} If sustainable competitive advantage depends on work force skills, American firms have a problem. Human resource management is not traditionally seen as central to the competitive survival of the firm in the United States. Skill acquisition is considered as an individual responsibility. Labor is simply another factor of production to be hired—rented at the lowest possible cost—much as one buys raw materials or equipment. The lack of importance attached to human resource management can be seen in the corporation hierarchy. In an American firm the chief financial officer is almost always second in command. The post of head of human resource managements is usually a specialized job, off at the edge of the corporate hierarchy. The executive who holds it is never consulted on major strategic decisions and has no chance to move up to Chief Executive Officer (CEO). By way of contrast, in Japan the head of human resource management is central—usually the second most important executive, after the CEO, in the firm's hierarchy. While American firms often talk about the vast amounts spent on training their work forces, in fact they invest less in the skill of their employees than the Japanese or German firms do. Themoney they do invest is also more highly concentrated on professional and managerial employees. And the limited investments that are made in training workers are also much more narrowly focused on the specific skills necessary to do the next job rather than on the basic background skills that make it possible to absorb new technologies. As a result, problems emerge when new breakthrough technologies arrive. If American workers, for example, take much longer to learn how to operate new flexible manufacturing stations than workers in Germany (as they do), the effective cost of those stations is lower in Germany than it is in the United Stated. More time is required before equipment is up and running at capacity, and the need for extensive retraining generates costs and creates bottlenecks that limit the speed with which new equipment can be employed. The result is a slower pace of technological change. And in the end the skills of the bottom half of the population affect the wages of the top half. If the bottom half can't effectively staff the processes that have to be operated, the management and professional jobs that go with these processes will disappear.

单选题In 1942, the HMS Edinburgh was sunk in the Barents Sea. It was on its (21) back to Britain with ninety-one boxes of Russian gold. (22) thirty-nine years it lay there, too deep for divers to (23) . No one was allowed to explore it, either, since the bodies of sixty of the crew also lay in the (24) . Then, in 1981, an ex-diver called Jessop decided to try using new diving techniques. (25) he could not afford to finance the (26) which was going to cost four million pounds, he had to look for people who were (27) to take the risk. (28) , they were not even sure the gold was going to be there! First a Scottish diving company, then a German shipping company agreed to join in the retrieval (29) Not long after that, Jessop (30) a fourth company to take a (31) Since the gold was the (32) of the British and the Soviet governments, they both hoped to make a (33) , too! The biggest problem was how to get (34) the gold. Fortunately, they were able to examine the Edinburgh's sister ship, the HMS Belfast, to (35) out the exact location of the bomb room, (36) the gold was stored. They knew it was to be an extremely difficult and dangerous undertaking. To reach the gold, they would have to cut a large square (37) the body of the ship, go through the empty fuel tank and down to the bomb room. After twenty-eight dives, they (38) to find the first bar. Everyone worked (39) the clock, helping to clean and stack the gold, (40) as to finish the job as quickly as possible.

单选题Text 2The universities have trained the intellectual pioneers of our civilization — the priests, the lawyers, the statesmen, the doctors, the men of science, and the men of letters. The conduct of business now requires intellectual imagination of the same type as that which in former times has mainly passed into those other occupations. There is one great difficulty which hinders all the higher types of human effort. In modern times, this difficulty has even increased in its possibilities for evil. In any large organization the younger men, who are novices, must be set to jobs which consist in carrying out fixed duties in obedience to orders. No president of a large corporation meets his youngest employee at his office door with the offer of the most responsible job which the work of that corporation includes. The young men are set to work at a fixed routine, and only occasionally even see the president as he passes in and out of the building. Such work is a great discipline. It imparts knowledge, and it produces reliability of character; also it is the only work for which the young men, in that novice stage, are fit, and it is the work for which they are hired. There can be no criticism of the custom, but there may be an unfortunate effect: prolonged routine work dulls the imagination. The way in which a university should function in the preparation for an intellectual career, is by promoting the imaginative consideration of the various general principles underlying that career. Its students thus pass into their period of technical apprenticeship with their imaginations already practiced in connecting details with general principles. Thus the proper function of a university is the imaginative acquisition of knowledge. Apart from this importance of the imagination, there is no reason why businessmen, and other professional men, should not pick up their facts bit by bit as they want them for particular occasions. A university is imaginative or it is nothing — at least nothing useful.

单选题A Red, Red Rose is written by [A] William Wordsworth. [B] Robert Burns. [C] William Blake. [D] John Keats.

单选题 Placing a human being behind the wheel of an automobile often has the same curios effect as cutting certain fibres in the brain. The result in either case is more primitive behaviour. Hostile feelings are apt to be ex pressed in an aggressive way. The same man who will step aside for a stranger at a doorway will, when behind the wheel, risk an accident trying to beat another motorist through an intersection. The importance of emotional factors in automobile accidents is gaining recognition. Doctors and other scientists have concluded that the highway death toll resembles a disease epidemic and should be investigated as such. Dr Ross A. McFarland, associate professor of industrial Hygiene at the Harvard University School of Public Health, aid that accidents "now constitute a greater threat to the safety of large segments of the population than diseases do." Accidents are the leading cause of death between the ages of 1 and 35. About one third of all accidental deaths and one seventh of all accidental injuries are caused by motor vehicles. Based on the present rate of vehicle registration, unless the accident rate is cut in half, one of every 10 persons in the country will be killed or injured in a traffic accident in the next 15 years. Research to find the underlying causes of accidents and to develop ways to detect drivers who are apt to cause them is being conducted at universities and medical centres. Here are some of their findings so far: A man drives as he lives. If he is often in trouble with collection agencies, the courts, and police, chances are he will have repeated automobile accidents. Accident repeaters usually are egocentric, exhibitionistic, resentful of authority, impulsive, and lacking in social responsibility. As a group, they can be classified as borderline psychopathic personalities, according to Dr. McFarland. The suspicion, however, that accident repeaters could be detected in advance by screening out persons width more hostile impulses is false. A study at the University of Colorado showed that there were just as many overly hostile persons among those who had no accidents as among those with repeated accidents. Psychologists currently are studying Denver high school pupils to test the validity of this concept. They are making psychological evaluations of the pupils to see whether subsequent driving records will bear out their thesis.

单选题What'sTomgoingtodoatthepostoffice?[A]Topostabook.[B]Topostacard.[C]Topostaletter.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} In Anglo-America there are three major ethnic groups. The first is the original Indian population, who today represents a minority group. The second is the descendants of European colonists who emigrated to the two countries before the end of the nineteenth century. These majority populations normally speak English, are highly-educated, and most of them are culturally homogeneous (同类的) in broad cultural values. A third group is made up of ethnic minorities, from Asia, Latin America, Africa, or parts of Europe who have either linguistic, religious, racial, or other cultural attributes that distinguish them from the majority population. The United States has a varied ethnic minority pattern, without the dominance of one minority group in a specific geographical area. The largest ethnic group in America is the blacks, totaling an estimated 26 million in 1980, or 12 percent of the population. Unlike the French, the black population of the United States is not culturally and geographically isolated in one area. Slightly more than half of American blacks live in the South, and 49 percent reside in the East and the West. The black American speaks English, has a tendency to share, the characteristics of competition, materialism, and individualism with other United States citizens, and has no distinctive religion. The Spanish-speaking minority in America is reluctant to adopt the values of the dominant cultural group. There is increasingly a demand for bilingual (双语的) education to allow Spanishspeaking children to use English in their educational programs. The existence of a large and growing minority population such as the Spanish-speaking Americans, who are increasingly committed to their own food and newspapers in Latin, is one of the issues facing Anglo-America in the future. The old concept of a melting pot is being replaced by the concept of a plural society.

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