单选题There are over 6 000 different computer and online games in the world now. A segment of them are considered to be both educational and harmlessly entertaining. One such game teaches geography, and another trains pilots. Others train the player in logical thinking and problem solving. Some games may also help young people to become more computer literate, which is more important in this technology-driven era. But the dark side of the computer games has become more and more obvious. "A segment of games features anti-social themes of violence, sex and crude language," says David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and Family. "Unfortunately, it"s a segment that seems particularly popular with kids aged eight to fifteen." One study showed that almost 80 percent of the computer and online games young people preferred contained violence. The investigators said "These are not just games anymore. These are learning machines. We"re teaching kids in the most incredible manner what it"s like to pull the trigger. What they are not learning are the real-life consequences. " They also said "The new and more sophisticated games are even worse, because they have better graphics and allow the player to participate in even more realistic violent acts." In the game Carmageddon, for example, the player will have driven over and killed up to 33 000 people by the time all levels are completed. A description of the outcome of the game says: "Your victims not only squish under your tires and splatter blood on the windshield, they also get on their knees and beg for mercy, or commit suicide. If you like, you can also dismember them. " Is all this simulated violence harmful? Approximately 3 000 different studies have been conducted on this subject. Many have suggested that there is a connection between violence in games and increased aggressiveness in the players. Some specialists downplay the influence of the games, saying that other factors must be taken into consideration, such as the possibility that kids who already have violent tendencies are choosing such games. But could it be that violent games still play a contributing role? It seems unrealistic to insist that people are not influenced by what they see. If that were true, why would the commercial world spend billions of dollars annually for television advertising?

单选题Sometimes the messages are conveyed through deliberate , conscious gestures; other times, our bodies talk without our even knowing.

单选题Apparently first described in 1964, transient global amnesia consists of a(n) abrupt loss of memory lasting from a few seconds to a few hours, without loss of consciousness or other evidence of impairment.

单选题I"m in a position to think about my future and plan it a little more rather than just waiting for what happens.

单选题Competition breeds excellence. Ask anyone who pays attention to the car industry and they will tell you that the family-sedan segment is just brutal, with manufacturers fighting tooth and nail over every sale. In fact, that market has become more competitive in recent years. It used to just be the Camry and the Accord fighting for supremacy, but now you have new (Hyundai) and old (Ford) competitors, among others, joining the fight, with interesting, well-made, compelling products. It"s a great time to be shopping for a new family sedan. Compare that with the state of the tablet market today. Hewlett-Packard is in retreat. Research in Motion is in a holding pattern. Motorola has been sold and its tablet is now an afterthought. Samsung fights the good fight, hut it trails Apple"s market share by 50 percentage points. Apple is not just ahead of the pack, it almost is the pack. Now, some would say that this is also a simple result of economic laws at work: Apple makes a superior product, therefore it gets most of the sales. But what would be really great is that, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and H.P., locked in an epic battle for tablet supremacy, are each releasing new and better products at a furious pace, and each dropping prices substantially at a steady clip. Apple is driving innovation and creativity with each upgrade of the iPad it releases. But this isn"t about whether you prefer Apple or Android for your tablet. This isn"t about picking sides. As a consumer, I want there to be robust competition across the board. I want Coke and Pepsi, Target and Wal-Mart, Engadget and Gizmodo. If you"re a fan of Apple, you want there to be a worthy rival push it, to keep its feet to the fire. If you don"t like Apple, you want someone else in the game so that Apple doesn"t suck all the air out of the room. And you want Apple to do the same pushing and foot scorching to its competitor that another company would do to it.

单选题On the grounds of Wimbledon, a year-round museum is devoted to the joys and history of the sport—and one of their current exhibits showcases Ted Tinling, the popular and controversial designer of tennis dresses.

单选题A: I have an appointment with Mr. Lee. B: Mr. Lee is expecting you now. ______

单选题Man: Jenny, why do you often watch talk shows? Woman: They make me laugh and sometimes crack me up, and I have learned a lot from their talks. Question: Why does the woman like watching talk shows?

单选题Under the right circumstances, choosing to spend time alone can be a huge psychological blessing. In the 1980s, the Italian journalist and author Tiziano Terzani, after many years of reporting across Asia, holed himself up in a cabin in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. "For a month I had no one to talk to except my dog Baoli," he wrote in his book A Fortune Teller Told Me . Terzani passed the time with books, observing nature, "listening to the winds in the trees, watching butterflies, enjoying silence." For the first time in a long while he felt free from the unending anxieties of daily life: "At last I had time to have time." Terzani"s embrace of isolation was relatively unusual: Humans have long considered solitude an inconvenience, something to avoid, a punishment, a realm of loners. Science has often associated it with negative outcomes. Freud, who linked solitude with anxiety, noted that, "in children the first fears relating to situations are those of darkness and solitude." John Cacioppo, a modern social neuro-scientist who has extensively studied loneliness—what he calls "chronic perceived isolation"—contends that, beyond damaging our thinking powers, isolation can even harm our physical health. But increasingly scientists are approaching solitude as something that, when pursued by choice, can prove a therapy. This is especially true in times of personal disorder, when the instinct is often for people to reach outside of themselves for support. "When people are experiencing crisis it"s not always just about you. It"s about how you are in society," explains Jack Fong, a sociologist at California State Polytechnic University who has studied solitude. In other words, when people remove themselves from the social context of their lives, they are better able to see how they"re shaped by that context. Thomas Merton, a monk and writer who spent years alone, held a similar notion. "We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our breast," he writes in Thoughts in Solitude . "People can go for a walk or listen to music and feel that they are deeply in touch with themselves."

单选题They are meticulous in work, well aware a careless mistake will cost the company millions of pounds.

单选题The process by means of which human beings arbitrarily make certain things stand for other things may be called the symbolic process. Everywhere we turn, we see the symbolic process at work. There are 1 things men do or want to do, possess or want to possess, that have not a symbolic value. Almost all fashionable clothes are 2 symbolic, so is food. We 3 our furniture to serve 4 visible symbols of our taste, wealth, and social position. We often choose our houses on the basis of a feeling that it "looks well" to have a "good address." We trade perfectly good cars in for 5 models not always to get better transportation, but to give evidence to the community that we can 6 it. Such complicated and apparently 7 behavior leads philosophers to ask over and over again, "why can"t human beings live simply and naturally." Often the complexity of human life makes us look enviously at the relative 8 of such live as dogs and cats. Simply, the fact that symbolic process makes complexity possible is no reason for wanting to 9 to a cat and to a eat-and-dog existence. A better solution is to understand the symbolic process so that instead of being its slaves we become, to some degree at least, its 10 .

单选题A: The wind will probably get up later. B: ______

单选题Rescuers have found the bodies of over 130 people killed in two ferry disasters in Bangladesh. The accidents happened during a storm that hit the country on April 21. Hundreds more are missing or feared dead. The two ferries sank in different rivers near the capital city of Dhaka as strong winds and rain hit the South Asian country. The government has since banned all ferries and other boats from travelling at night during the April-May stormy season. One of the ferries, MV Mitali, was carrying far more people than it was supposed to. About 400 passengers fitted into a space made for just 300, police said the second ferry carried about 100 passengers. "The number of deaths is certain to rise," said an official in charge of the rescue work. "No one really knows how many people were on board or how many of them survived." Ferries in Bangladesh don"t always keep passenger lists, making it difficult to determine the exact number of people on board. Besides the ferry accidents, at least 40 people were killed and 400 injured by lightning strikes, falling houses and trees and the sinking of small boats. Storms are common this time of year in Bangladesh, as are boating accidents. Ferry disasters take away hundreds of lives every year in a nation of 130 million people. Officials blame these river accidents on a lack of safety measures, too many passengers in boats and not enough checks on weather conditions. Ferries are a common means of transport in Bangladesh. It is a country covered by about 230 rivers. Some 20,000 ferries use the nation"s waterways (水路) every year. And many of them are dangerously overcrowded (过度拥挤). Since 1977, more than 3,000 people have died in some 260 boating accidents.

单选题Man: I have to phone my secretary before we leave. Woman: There is not much time. Maybe you"d better get Tom to phone for you. Question: What does the woman mean?

单选题Woman: Anne says she"ll be visiting us on Friday. Man: I suppose that"ll be the last we"ll see her until she comes back to college in the fall. Question: What time does the conversation probably take place?

单选题How many of today"s ailments, or even illnesses, are purely psychological? And how far can these be alleviated by the use of drugs? For example a psychiatrist concerned mainly with the emotional problems of old people might improve their state of mind somewhat by the use of anti-depressants but he would not remove the root cause of their depression—the feeling of being useless, often unwanted and handicapped by failing physical powers. One of the most important controversies in medicine today is how far doctors, and particularly psychologists, should depend on the use of drugs for "curing" their patients. It is not merely that drugs may have been insufficiently tested and may reveal harmful side effects (as happened in the case of anti-sickness pills prescribed for expectant mothers) but the uneasiness of doctors who feel that they are treating the symptoms of a disease without removing the disease itself. On the other hand, some psychiatrists argue that in many cases (such as chronic depressive illness) it is impossible to get at the root of the illness while the patient is in a depressed state. Even prolonged psychiatric care may have no noticeable effect whereas some people can be lifted out of a depression by the use of drugs within a matter of weeks. These doctors feel not only that they have no right to withhold such treatment, but that the root cause of depression can be tackled better when the patient himself feels better. This controversy is concerned, however, with the serious psychological illnesses. It does not solve the problem of those whose headaches, indigestion, backache, etc. are due to "nerves". Commonly a busy family doctor will ascribe them to some physical cause and as a matter of routine prescribe a drug. Once again the symptoms are being cured rather than the disease itself. It may be true to say, as one doctor suggested recently, that over half of the cases that come to the ordinary doctor"s attention are not purely physical ailments. If this is so, the situation is serious indeed.

单选题Without question there are plenty of bargains to be had at sales time—particularly at the top-quality shops whose reputation depends on having only the best and newest goods in stock each season. They tend, for obvious reasons, to be the fashion or seasonal goods which in due course become the biggest bargains. It is true that some goods are specially brought in for the sales but these too can provide exceptional value. A manufacturer may have the end of a range left on his hands and be glad to sell the lot off cheaply to shops; or he may have a surplus of a certain material which he is glad to make up and get rid of cheaply; or he may be prepared to produce a special line at low cost merely to keep his employees busy during a slack period. He is likely to have a good many "seconds" available and if their defects are trifling these may be particularly good bargains. Nevertheless, sales do offer a special opportunity for sharp practices and shoppers need to be extra critical. For example the "second" should be clearly marked as such and not sold as if they were perfect. (The term "substandard", incidentally, usually indicates a more serious defect than "seconds".) More serious is the habit of marking the price down from an alleged previous price which is in fact fictitious. Misdescription of this and all other kinds is much practiced by the men who run one day sales of carpets in church halls and the like. As the sellers leave the district the day after the sale there is little possibility of redress . In advertising sales, shops may say "only 100 left" when in fact they have plenty more; conversely they may say "10 000 at half-price" when only a few are available at such a drastic reduction. If ever the warning "let the buyer beware" were necessary it is during sales.

单选题The rich have traditionally passed their wealth on to their children. But an increasing number of billionaires are choosing not to. The reason? They want their children to live on themselves—and not to turn into spoiled successors. Nicola Horlick or "supermom", a famous British billionaire, owing to the fact that she has high-flying jobs and five kids—has spent her career making a report ￡250m. She now seems determined to throw off large parts of it. She already gives away about 25% of her income each year; she has just revealed, in a report on the state of charity in the city, that she will not be leaving most of the remainder to her children. "I think it is wrong to give too much inherited wealth to children," Horlick told the report"s authors. "I will not be leaving all my wealth to my children because that would just ruin their lives." She is by no means the first to go public with this convition. Bill Gates has put an estimated $30bn into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This was supplemented, in 2009, by another $24bn or so from his friend Warren Buffett. Buffett has always been colorful, quotably clear on where he stands. His daughter often tells a story of finding herself without change for a car parking ticket—her father lent her $20, then promptly made her write him a check. "To suggest that the children of the wealthy should be just as wealthy," he has said, "is like saying the members of America"s 2004 Olympic team should be made up only of the children of the 1980 Olympic team." Antia Roddick, the late founder of the Body Shop, told her kids that they would not inherit one penny. The money that she made from the company would go into the Body Shop Foundation, which isn"t one of those awful tax shelters, like some in America. It just functions to take the money and give it away.

单选题Predicting the future is risky business for a scientist. It is safe to say, however, that the global AIDS epidemic will get much worse before it gets any better. Sadly, this modern plague will be with us for several generations, despite major scientific advances. As of January 2000, the AIDS epidemic had claimed 15 million lives and left 40 million people living with a viral infection that slowly but relentlessly erodes the immune system. Accounting for more than 3 million deaths in the past year alone, the AIDS virus has become the deadliest microbe in the world. In Africa nearly a dozen countries have a rate higher than 10%, including four southern African nations in which a quarter of the people are infected. This is like condemning 16 000 people each day to a slow and miserable death. Fortunately, the AIDS story has not been all gloom and doom . Less than two years after AIDS was recognized, the guilty agent—human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV—was identified. We now know more about HIV than about any other virus, and 14 AIDS drugs have been developed and licensed in the U.S. and Western Europe. The epidemic continues to rage, however, in South America, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. By the year 2025, AIDS will be by far the major killer of young Africans, decreasing life expectancy to as low as 40 years in some countries and single-handedly erasing the public health gains of the past 50 years. It is Asia, with its huge population at risk, that will have the biggest impact on the global spread of AIDS. The magnitude of the incidence could range from 100 million to 1 billion, depending largely on what happens in India and China. Four million people have already become HIV-positive in India, and infection is likely to reach several percent in a population of 1 billion. Half a million Chinese are now infected; the path of China"s epidemic, however, is less certain. An explosive AIDS epidemic in the U.S. is unlikely. Instead, HIV infection will continue to plague in about 0.5% of the population. But the complexion of the epidemic will change. New HIV infections will occur predominantly in the underclass, with rates 10 times as high in minority groups. Nevertheless, American patients will live quality lives for decades, thanks to advances in medical research. Dozens of powerful and well-tolerated AIDS drugs will be developed, as will novel means to restore the immune system. A cure for AIDS by the year 2025 is not inconceivable. But constrained by economic reality, these therapeutic advances will have only limited benefit outside the U.S. and Western Europe.

单选题Anthropology is a science dealing with man and his origins. I redefine anthropology here as "being interested, without judgment, in the way other people choose to live and behave," in order to turn it into a strategy which is geared toward developing your compassion as well as a way of becoming more patient. When someone acts in a way that seems strange to you, rather than reacting in your usual way, such as, "I can"t believe they would do that." Instead, say something to yourself like "I see, that must be the way she sees things in her world. Very interesting." In order for this strategy to help you, you have to be genuine. There"s a line between being "interested" and being arrogant, as if secretly you believe that your way is better. Recently I was at a local shopping mall with my six-year old daughter. A group of punks walked by with orange spiked(成锥形的) hair and tattoos(文身) covering much of their bodies. My daughter immediately asked me, "Daddy, why are they dressed up like that? Are they in costumes?" Years ago I would have felt very judgmental and frustrated about these young people—as if their way was wrong and my more conservative way was right. I would have blurted out some judgmental explanations to my daughter and passed along to her my judgmental views. Pretending to be an anthropologist, however, has changed my perspective a great deal; it"s made me softer. I said to my daughter, "I"m not really sure, but it"s interesting how different we all are, isn"t it?" She said, "Yeah, but I like my own hair." Rather than focusing on the behavior and continuing to give it energy, we both dropped it and continued to enjoy our time together. When you are interested in other perspectives, it doesn"t imply, even slightly, that you"re advocating it. I certainly wouldn"t choose a punk rock lifestyle or suggest it to anyone else. At the same time, however, it"s really not my place to judge it either. One of the basic rules of joyful living is that judging others takes a great deal of energy and, without exception, pulls you away from where you want to be.