单选题Despite decades of scientific research, no one yet knows how much damage human activity is doing to the environment. Humans are thought to be responsible for a whole host of environmental problems, ranging from global warning to ozone depletion. What is not in doubt, however, is the devastating effect humans are having on the animal and plant life of the planet. Currently, an estimated 50,000 species become extinct every year. If this carries on, the impact on all living creatures is likely to be profound, says Dr. Nick Middleton, a geographer at Oxford University. " All species depend in some way on each other to survive. And the danger is that, if you remove one species from this very complex web of interrelationships, you have very little idea about the knock-on effects of other extinctions. " Complicating matters is the fact that there are no obvious solutions to the problem. Unlike global warning and ozone depletion—which, if the political will was there, could be reduced by cutting gas emissions—preserving biodiversity remains an intractable problem. The latest idea is " sustainable management " , which is seen as a practical and economical way of protecting species from extinction. This means humans should be able to use any species of animal or plant for their benefit, provided enough individuals of that species are left alive to ensure its continued existence. For instance, instead of depending on largely ineffective laws against poaching, it gives local people a good economic reason to preserve plants and animals. In Zimbabwe, there is a sustainable management project elephants. Foreign tourists pay large sums of money to kill these animals for sport. This money is then given to the inhabitants of the area where the hunting takes place. In theory, locals will be encouraged to protect elephants, instead of poaching them—or allowing others to poach them—because of the economic benefit involved. This sounds like a sensible strategy, but it remains to be seen whether it will work. With corruption endemic in many developing countries, some observers are skeptical that the money will actually reach the people it is intended for．Others wonder how effective the locals will be at stopping poachers. There are also questions about whether sustainable management is practical when it comes to protecting areas of great-bio-diversity such as the world's tropical forests. In theory, the principle should be the same as with elephants—allow logging companies to cut down a certain number of trees, but not so many as to completely destroy the forest. Sustainable management of forests requires controls on the number of trees which are cut down, as well as investment in replacing them. But because almost all tropical forests are located in countries which desperately need revenue from logging, there are few regulations to do this. Moreover, unrestricted logging is so much more profitable that wood prices from managed forests would cost up to five times more—an increase that consumers, no matter how " green " , are unlikely to pay. For these reasons, sustainable management of tropical forests is unlikely to become widespread in the near future. This is disheartening news. It's estimated these forests contain anything from 50 to 90 percent of all animal and plant species on Earth. In one study of a five-square-kilometer area of rain forest in Peru, for instance, scientists counted 1,300 species of butterfly and 600 species of bird. In the entire continental United States, only 400 species of butterfly and 700 species of bird have been recorded. Scientist Professor Norman Myers sees this situation as a gigantic " experiment we're conducting with our planet " . " We don't know what the outcome will be. If we make a mess of it, we can't move to another planet…It's a case of one planet, one experiment. /

单选题A beautiful woman lowers her eyes shyly beneath a hat. In an earlier era, her gaze might have signaled a mysterious allure. But this is a 2003 advertisement for Zoloft, an inhibitory drug approved by the F.D.A. to treat social anxiety disorder. "Is she just shy? Or is it Social Anxiety Disorder?" reads the caption, suggesting that the young woman is not luring people at all. She is sick. This does us all grave harm, because shyness and timidness—or more precisely, the careful, sensitive temperament from which both often spring—are not just normal. Indeed, they are valuable. And they may be essential to the survival of our species. But shyness and introversion share an undervalued status in a world that prizes being sociable. Children's classroom desks are now often arranged in pods, because group participation supposedly leads to better learning. Many adults work for organizations that now assign work in teams, in offices without walls, for supervisors who value "people skills" above all. As a society, we prefer action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. As the psychologist William Hart points out, phrases like "get active," "get moving," "do something" and similar calls to action surface repeatedly in recent books. Yet shy and introverted people have been part of our species for a very long time, often in leadership positions. We find them in recent history, in figures like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, and, in contemporary times: think of Google's Larry Page. Sitters and strollers favor different survival strategies, which could be summed up as the sitter's "Look before you leap" versus the stroller's inclination to "Just do it!" Once you know about sitters and strollers, you see them everywhere, especially among young children. Drop in on your local Mommy and Me music class: there are the sitters, intently watching the action from their mothers' laps, while the strollers march around the room banging their drums and shaking their maracas. Relaxed and exploratory, the strollers have fun, make friends and will take risks, both rewarding and dangerous ones, as they grow. In contrast, sitter children are careful and shrewd, and tend to learn by observing instead of by acting. They notice scary things more than other children do, but they also notice more things in general. The psychologist Gregory Feist found that many of the most creative people in a range of fields are introverts who are comfortable working in solitary conditions in which they can f0CUS attention inward. Another advantage sitters bring to leadership is a willingness to listen to and implement other people's ideas. Now, it's time for the young woman in the Zoloft ad to rediscover her lure.

单选题These days, the computerised world presents spies across the globe with both a challenge and an opportunity. Unlike the paper kind, electronic data is weightless, and computers are riddled with security holes. That makes stealing secrets easier than ever. At the same time, computers are able to place the sort of cryptography with which Bletchley Park struggled in the Second World War into the hands of everyone—including criminals, foreign spies and terrorists. Balancing the risks and rewards can sometimes be difficult. Mr. Corera describes how Markus Wolf, the head of East Germany"s notorious Stasi, resisted the temptation to computerise his organisation"s miles of paper files. After all, pointed out Mr. Wolf, the very convenience of computerised data made a big leak more likely. That point was spectacularly illustrated in 2013, when Edward Snowden walked out of America"s National Security Agency with tens of thousands of pilfered documents, a feat that would have been impossible in the pre-computer age. Mr. Corera has been given plenty of access to Western intelligence agencies, and he describes their dilemmas with sympathy. Monitoring the internet for suspicious behaviour may help forestall a terrorist attack, they point out, and arguments about privacy can seem abstract and unreal after such attacks succeed. At the same time he does not shy away from the implications of granting the spies ever more power to surveil. Technology has made practical the kind of mass surveillance that would have turned Mr. Wolf green with envy. In the West, at least, such powers are held in check by laws governing how the agencies behave. But the temptation to go further, to trade a little more privacy for a little more security, is always present. At the same time, the ability to conduct such mass surveillance is no longer confined to nation-states. The Internet"s biggest companies—such as Facebook and Google—have put a corporate twist on mass surveillance. The price for their services is collecting up users" data: detailed lists of their preferences, habits, opinions and life histories, all packaged up and sold to advertisers to help them target commercial products. The main message of Mr. Corera"s book, though, is that computers have automated espionage, and made it cheap and easy. Spying on someone used to be hard, labour-intensive work. Tails had to be set, hidden microphones planted, post intercepted and steamed open. These days a person"s laptop and smart-phone broadcasts their life across the Internet, pre-packaged into a form that other computers can digest, analyse and correlate. Never mind all those cold-war thrillers set in 1970s Berlin. The true golden age of spying and surveillance—whether carried out by states or, increasingly, by companies—is now.

单选题Etiquette cultivated as art of gracious living

单选题The paper by Dr. Just and Dr. Minshew is meant to examine ______.

单选题The first paragraph uses several examples to convey the ideas that______.

单选题The "Nightline" case shows that________.

单选题It can be inferred from the para. 1 that ______.

单选题It can be inferred that voters in rich countries fail to realize

单选题The history of the computer in the twentieth century is one of dramatic adaptation and expansion. The computer had modest beginnings in areas where it was used as a specialist tool. The first electronic computer was built in the 1930s and was solely for the use of undergraduate students in Iowa State University to handle mathematical computations in nuclear physics. In the 1960s an early version of the Internet, ARPPANET was used in computer science and engineering projects. However, only 10 years later computers were starting to change our life style, the way we do business and many other things and by the late 1980s' networks were expanding to embrace sections of the general public. Computerization has changed US high school education in many ways. Three different changes that consider being important. The first is the use of the computer as teaching aid for teachers. The next is the massive data storage and fast data retrieval facilitated by computer. Then comes the changes brought about by the introduction of simulation software. How prevalent is the use of computers in schools! As recently as the early 1980s only 20% of secondary science teachers in the USA were using microcomputers. However, since then high schools in the US have computer zed rapidly. By 1987, schools had acquired about 1.5 million computers with 95% of public schools having at least one computer. Computers can be used as teaching aids both in schools and in homes. In schools, for example, teachers can plug a computer into an especially equipped overhead projector to bring texts, graphics, sound and videos into a classroom. By these multimedia computer animations, teachers can more readily attract and retain students' attention. Ann concludes that computer aided teaching can attract and motivate students who were dropping out when more traditional methods were being used. Let us now turn to the Internet. This is a global network connecting many local networks. Over the Internet, high school students can retrieve information and databases from every networked library around the world in seconds. The World Wide Web provides an easy way to access hard-to-find information. Students can now reach any library through the global network and find what they want. The final step is to download the scanned image. Though the slow transmission of signal through the network is a major limiting factor, it can still save us much time in finding useful information, and thus it is an invaluable tool to both high school teachers and students.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} The day was star-crossed: Friday the 13th in the month of October, on the eve of the second looming anniversary of a devastating market crash. "I'm telling you, psychology is really funny. People get crazy in situations like that," said portfolio strategist Elaine Garzarelli. Last week Friday the 13th lived up to its frightful reputation. After drifting lower at a sleepy pace for most of the day, the Dow Jones industrial average abruptly lurched into a hair-raising sky dive in the final hour of trading. The Bush Administration moved swiftly to avert any sense of crisis after the market closed. Declared Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady: "It's important to recognize that today's stock market decline doesn't signal any fundamental change in the condition of the economy. The economy remains well balanced, and the outlook is for continued moderate growth." But Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey, who chairs a House subcommittee on telecommunications and finance, vowed to hold hearings this week on the stock market slide. Said he: "This is the second heart attack. My hope is that before we have the inevitable third heart attack, we pay attention to these problems." Experts found no shortage of culprits to blame for {{U}}the latest shipwreck.{{/U}} A series of downbeat realizations converged on Friday, ranging from signs of a new burst of inflation to sagging corporate profits to troubles in the junk-bond market that has fueled major takeovers. The singular event that shook investors was the faltering of a $6.75 billion labor management buyout of UAL, the parent company of United Airlines, the second largest U. S. carrier. On one point most thoughtful Wall Streeters agreed: the market had reached such dizzying heights that a correction of some sort seemed almost inevitable. Propelled by favorable economic news and a wave of multibillion-dollar takeovers, stocks had soared more than 1,000 points since the 1987 crash. But by last August some Wall streeters were clearly worried. The heaviest blow to the market came Friday afternoon. In a three-paragraph statement, UAL said a labor-management group headed by Chairman Stephen Wolf had failed to get enough financing to acquire United. Several banks had apparently balked at the deal, which was to be partly financed through junk bonds. The take-over group said it would submit a revised bid "in the near term,' but the announcement stunned investors who had come to view the United deal as the latest sure thing in the 1980s buyout binge. Said John Downey, a trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange: "The airline stocks have looked like attractive takeover targets. But with the United deal in trouble, everyone started to wonder what other deals might not go through."

单选题The world religion is derived from the Latin noun religion, which denotes both (1) observance of ritual obligations and an inward spirit of reverence. In modern usage, religion covers a wide spectrum of (2) that reflects the enormous variety of ways the term can be (3) . At one extreme, many committed believers (4) only their own tradition as a religion, understanding expressions such as worship and prayer to refer (5) to the practices of their tradition. They may (6) use vague or idealizing terms in defining religion, (7) , true love of God, or the path of enlightenment. At the other extreme, religion may be equated with (8) , fanaticism, or wishful thinking. By defining religion as a sacred engagement with what is taken to be a spiritual reality, it is possible to consider the importance of religion in human life without making (9) about what is really is or ought to be. Religion is not an object with a single, fixed meaning, or (10) a zone with clear boundaries. It is an aspect of human (11) that may intersect, incorporate, or transcend other aspects of life and society. Such a definition avoid the drawbacks of (12) the investigation of religion to Western or biblical categories (13) monotheism or church structure, which are not (14) . Religion in this understanding includes a complex of activities that cannot be (15) to any single aspect of human experience. It is a part of individual life but also of (16) dynamics. Religion includes not only patterns of language and thought. It is sometimes an (17) part of a culture. Religious experience may be expressed (18) visual symbols, dance and performance, elaborate philosophical systems, legendary and imaginative stories, formal (19) , and detailed rules of some ways. There are as many forms of religious expression as there are human cultural (20) .

单选题Sometimes it"s just hard to choose. You"re in a restaurant and the waiter has his pen at the ready. As you hesitate, he gradually begins to take a close interest in the ceiling, his fingernails, then in your dining partner. Each dish on the menu becomes a blur as you roll your eyes up and down in a growing panic. Finally, you desperately opt for something that turns out to he what you hate. It seems that we need devices to protect us from our hopelessness at deciding between 57 barely differentiated varieties of stuff—be they TV channels, gourmet coffee, downloadable ring tones, or perhaps, ultimately even interchangeable lovers. This thought is opposed to our government"s philosophy, which suggests that greater choice over railways, electricity suppliers and education will make us happy. In my experience, they do anything but. Perhaps the happiest people are those who do not have much choice and aren"t confronted by the misery of endless choice. True, that misery may not be obvious to people who don"t have a variety of luxuries. If you live in Madagascar, say, where average life expectancy is below 40 and they don"t have digital TV or Starbucks, you might not be impressed by the anxiety and perpetual stress our decision-making paralysis causes. Choice wasn"t supposed to -make people miserable. It was supposed to be the hallmark of self-determination that we so cherish in modern society. But it obviously isn"t: ever more choice increases the feeling of missed opportunities, and this leads to self-blame when choices fail to meet expectations. What is to be done? A new book by an American social scientist, Barry Schwartz, called The Paradox of Choice, suggests that reducing choices can limit anxiety. Schwartz offers a self-help guide to good decision-making that helps us to limit our choices to a manageable number, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices we make. But once you realize that your Schwartzian filters are depriving you of something you might have found enjoyable, you will experience the same anxiety as before, worrying that you made the wrong decision in drawing up your choice-limiting filters. Arguably, we will always be doomed to buyers" remorse and the misery it entails. The problem of choice is perhaps more difficult than Schwartz allows.

单选题Pronouncing a language is a skill. Every normal person is an expert in the skill of pronouncing his own language, but few people are even moderately proficient at pronouncing foreign languages. Now there are many reasons for this, some obvious, some perhaps not so obvious. But I suggest that the fundamental reason why people in general do not speak foreign languages very much better than they do is that they fail to grasp the true nature of the problem of learning to pronounce, and consequently never set about tackling it in the right way. Far too many people fail to realize that pronouncing a foreign language is a skill, one that needs careful training of a special kind, and one that cannot be acquired by just leaving it to take care of itself. I think even teachers of language, while recognizing the importance of a good accent, tend to neglect, in their practical teaching, the branch of study concerned with speaking the language. So the first point I want to make is that English pronunciation must be taught; the teacher should be prepared to devote some of the lesson time to this, and by his whole attitude to the subject should get the student to feel that here is a matter worthy of receiving his close attention. So there should be occasions when other aspects of English, such as grammar or spelling, are allowed for the moment to take second place. Apart from this question of the time given to pronunciation, there are two other requirements for the teacher: the first, knowledge; the second, technique. It is important that the teacher should be in possession of the necessary information. This can generally be obtained from books. It is possible to get from books some idea of the mechanics of speech, and of what we call general phonetic theory. It is also possible in this way to get a clear mental picture of the relationship between the sounds of different languages, between the speech habits of English people and those, say, of your students. Unless the teacher has such a picture, any comments he may make on his students' pronunciation are unlikely to be of much use, and lesson time spent on pronunciation may well be time-wasted. But it does not follow that you can teach pronunciation successfully as soon as you have read the necessary books. It depends, after that, on what use you make of your knowledge, and this is a matter of technique. Now the first and most important part of a language teacher's technique is his own performance, his ability to demonstrate the spoken language, in every detail of articulation as well as in fluent speaking, so that the student's latent capacity for imitation is given the fullest scope and encouragement. The teacher, then, should be as perfect a model in this respect as he can make himself. And to supplement his own performance, however satisfactory this may be, the modern teacher has at his disposal recordings, radio, television and video, to supply the authentic voices of native speakers, or, if the teacher happens to be a native speaker himself or speaks just like one, then to vary the method of presenting the language material.