单选题Which of the following may best describe the tone of the speech by the former U.S. President Carter?

单选题"It is an evil influence on the youth of our country. " A politician condemning video gaming? Actually, a clergyman denouncing rock and roll 50 years ago. But the sentiment could just as easily have been voiced by Hillary Clinton in the past few weeks, as she blamed video games for "a silent epidemic of media desensitisation" and "stealing the innocence of our children". The gaming furore centers on "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas", a popular and notoriously violent cops and robbers game that turned out to contain hidden sex scenes that could be unlocked using a patch downloaded from the internet. The resulting outcry (mostly from Democratic politicians playing to the centre) caused the game's rating in America to be changed from "mature", which means you have to be 17 to buy it, to "adults only", which means you have to be 18, but also means that big retailers such as Wal-Mart will not stock it. As a result the game has been banned in Australia; and, this autumn, America's Federal Trade Commission will investigate the complaints. That will give gaming's opponents an opportunity to vent their wrath on the industry. Skepticism of new media is a tradition with deep roots, going back at least as far as Socrates' objections to written texts, outlined in Plato's Phaedrus. Socrates worried that relying on written texts, rather than the oral tradition, would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves." (He also objected that a written version of a speech was no substitute for the ability to interrogate the speaker, since, when questioned, the text "always gives one unvarying answer". His objection, in short, was that books were not interactive. Perhaps Socrates would have thought more highly of video games.) Novels were once considered too low-brow for university literature courses, but eventually the disapproving professors retired. Waltz music and dancing were condemned in the 19th century; all that twirling was thought to be "intoxicating" and "depraved", and the music was outlawed in some places. Today it is hard to imagine what the fuss was about. And rock and roll was thought to encourage violence, promiscuity and Satanism; but today even grannies buy Coldplay albums.

单选题Which of the following is NOT the reason that breakfast is essential?

单选题Whoever said that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan, surely had never heard of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the case of the hapless multilateral trade body and its long suffering representatives, the total failure of the opening meeting of the so called Millennium trade round has lots of people boasting of their roles in the violent physical struggle. Well. That's just brilliant. They are proud of being part of a movement that wants to wreck the most important engine of economic growth, prosperity and overall global rising living standards we have--the freedom of trade and movement of people and goods between nations. The 135-member WTO is composed of sovereign governments wishing to further this goal and ease the settlement of international trade disputes. From the sounds emanating from Seattle, though, it would now seem the WTO has now replaced the Trilateral Commission and the Freemasons as candidate No. 1 to take over the World. Everybody has his favorite Seattle story. The city's police chief will have plenty of time to think about his, having now resigned in disgrace over the loss of control of downtown Seattle. The Seattle business community may be more inclined to brood over theirs--the poor fools invested $ 9 million to attract the meeting to their fine city. What stands out more? I would nominate the union of steel workers who were marching in protest. It's an image that will boggle the mind for years to come. The debate now is over just how effective this anti-globalist coalition will turn out to be. In the heat of the moment, it always looks as though the world as we know it is coming to an end. But the overwhelming likelihood is that we have not actually seen a replay of the anti Vietnam War movement, which had much clearer focus, obviously, though its consequences were far-reaching. How long, after all, can you protest against cheap imports when those same imports are all over your house? No, the real reason for the disaster in Seattle is political, and reports coming out of the meeting point to President Clinton as a major culprit. Which may be both good and bad. Taking the long view, other trade rounds have had difficult beginnings, too. It took years to get the Uruguay Round under way, which finally happened in 1986. Thankfully, we will soon be electing another president, and it should be someone whose actions match his rhetoric. Still, it is a disgrace that the world's greatest trading nation, i.e. the United States, is currently led by a man whose motivations are so narrowly political and egocentric that he has now wrecked any chance of entering the history books as a champion of free trade.

单选题Current gym dogma holds that to build muscle size you need to lift heavy weights. (1) , a new study (2) at McMaster University has shown that a similar degree of muscle building can be achieved by using lighter weights. The secret is to pump air (3) you reach muscle fatigue. The (4) are published in PLoS ONE. " (5) grunting and straining to lift heavy weights, you can (6) something much lighter but you have to lift it until you can't lift it (7) ," says Stuart Phillips, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University. "We're convinced that (8) muscle means (9) your muscle to make new muscle proteins, a process in the body that over time (10) into bigger muscles. " Phillips praised lead author and senior Ph.D. student Nicholas Burd for masterminding the project that showed it's really not the weight that you lift but the fact that you get muscular fatigue that's the (11) point in building muscle. The study used light weights that (12) a percentage of what the (13) could lift. The heavier weights were set (14) 90% of a person's best lift and the light weights at a mere 30%o of what people could lift. "It's a very light weight," says Phillips noting that the 80% 90% (15) is usually something people can lift from 5～10 times before fatigue sets in. At 30%, Burd reported that subjects could lift that weight at least 24 times (16) they felt fatigue. "We're (17) to see where this new paradigm will lead," says Phillips, adding that these new data have (18) significance for gym enthusiasts but more importantly for people with compromised skeletal muscle mass, (19) the elderly, patients with cancer, or those who are (20) from trauma, surgery or even stroke.

单选题The Japanese government wants women like Taeko Mizuguchi to get married and start doing something about the nation's plunging birthrate. But she's not interested. At least, not if her prospective husband is Japanese. A growing number of Japanese women are giving up on their male counterparts, and taking a gamble that looking abroad for love will bring them the qualities in a partner that seem rare at home. "They treat you like equals, and they don't hesitate to express mutual feelings of respect -- I think Western men are more adept at such things than Japanese men," says the 36-year-old Ms. Miznguchi, who works at a top trading firm. "They don't act like women are maids -- I think they view women as individuals." Underscoring that Japanese women are losing hope with the local boys, dating agencies to help snag a Western husband have sprung up in Tokyo, some with branches in the US and Europe. Such companies rigorously vet their clients, screening for education, family background, occupation, and life goals. The kind of women who sign up for such services include doctors, lawyers, and other professionals -- women who have delayed marriage to concentrate on careers and who aren't keen to give up hard won gains to become a housewife, as many Japanese men expect. A generation of women who are now entering their 30s don't want to give up single life unless prospective partners are willing to break from traditional gender roles. Government polls conducted to find out why women have put off marriage until well after 25 years of age -- known as a woman's "'best before' date" -- show that economic independence is key to the change. As most Japanese women have their own income, marriage is no longer a financial necessity and women want to find companionship in a husband. Having ruled out an old-fashioned Japanese husband, many women here think the solution is a Western man. Indeed, some seem so enthralled with the idea that they are willing to spend thousands of dollars to inspect the wares personally. To be fair, not all the blame for female angst here can be laid on Japanese men. The government has been slow to enforce equal opportunity laws, and both pay and the glass ceiling in most Japanese corporations remain low for women. Recession has hampered longer maternity leave and other family-friendly policies. As Japan's fertility rate drops to new lows, the government is anxiously drawing up plans to make it easier for young couples to raise children, through such measures as the provision of cheap public housing.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} If you leave a loaded weapon lying around, it is bound to go off sooner or later. Snow- covered northern Europe heard the gunshot loud and clear when Russia cut supplies to Ukraine this week as part of a row about money and power, the two eternal battlegrounds of global energy. From central Europe right across to France on the Atlantic seaboard, gas supplies fell by more than one-third. For years Europeans had been telling themselves that a cold-war enemy which had supplied them without fail could still be depended on now it was an ally (of sorts). Suddenly, nobody was quite so sure. Fearing the threat to its reputation as a supplier, Russia rapidly restored the gas and settled its differences with Ukraine. But it was an uncomfortable glimpse of the dangers for a continent that imports roughly half its gas and that Gerard Mestrallet, boss of Suez, a French water and power company, expects to be importing 80% of its gas by 2030 much of it from Russia. It was scarcely more welcome for America, which condemned Russia's tactics. And no wonder: it consumes one-quarter of the world's oil, but produces only 3% of the stuff. Over the coming years, the world's dependence on oil looks likely to concentrate on the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. Russian oil had seemed a useful alternative. Fear of the energy weapon has a long history. When producers had the upper hand in the oil embargo of 1973-74, Arab members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cut supply, sowing turmoil and a global recession. When consumers had the upper hand in the early 1990s, the embargo cut the other way. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the world shut in 5m barrels a day (b/d) of production from the two countries in an attempt to force him out. With oil costing ＄60 a barrel, five times more than the nominal price in 1999, and spot prices for natural gas in some European and American markets at or near record levels, power has swung back to the producers for the first time since the early 1980s. Nobody knows how long today's tight markets will last. "It took us a long time to get there and it will take us a long time to get back," says Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy in Washington. A clutch of alarmist books with titles such as "The Death of Oil" predict that so little oil is left in the ground that producers will always have pricing power. The question is how worried consumers should be. What are the threats to energy security and what should the world do about them? The answers suggest a need for planning and a certain amount of grim realism, but not for outright panic.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} "You are not here to tell me what to do. You are here to tell me why I have done what I have already decided to do," Montagu Norman, the Bank of England' s longest- serving governor (1920 -1944), is reputed to have once told his economic adviser. To- day, thankfully, central banks aim to be more transparent in their decision making, as well as more rational. But achieving either of these things is not always easy. With the most laudable of intentions, the Federal Reserve, America's central bank, may be about to take a step that could backfire. Unlike the Fed, many other central banks have long declared explicit inflation tar- gels and then set interest rates to try to meet these. Some economists have argued that the Fed should do the same. With Alan Greenspan, the Fed' s much-respected chairman, due to retire next year—after a mere 18 years in the job—some Fed officials want to adopt a target, presumably to maintain the central bank' s credibility in the scary new post-Greenspan era. The Fed discussed such a target at its February meeting, according to minutes published this week. This sounds encouraging. However, the Fed is considering the idea just when some other central banks are beginning to question whether strict inflation targeting really works. At present central banks focus almost exclusively on consumer-price indices. On this measure Mr. Greenspan can boast that inflation remains under control. But some central bankers now argue that the prices of assets, such as houses and shares, should also some- how be taken into account. A broad price index for America which includes house prices is currently running at 5.5% , its fastest pace since 1982. Inflation has simply taken a different form. Should central banks also try to curb increases in such asset prices? Mr. Greenspan continues to insist that monetary policy should not be used to prick asset-price bubbles. Identifying bubbles is difficult, except in retrospect, he says, and interest rates are a blunt weapon: an increase big enough to halt rising prices could trigger a recession. It is better, he says, to wait for a housing or stockmarket bubble to burst and then to cushion the economy by cutting interest rates—as he did in 2001-2002. And yet the risk is not just that asset prices can go swiftly into reverse. As with traditional inflation, surging asset prices also distort price signals and so can cause a misallocation of resources—encouraging too little saving, for example, or ,too much investment in housing. Surging house prices may therefore argue for higher interest rates than conventional inflation would demand. In other words, strict inflation targeting—the fad of the 1990s—is too crude.

单选题Scores of workers from MTV Networks walked off the job yesterday afternoon, filling the sidewalk outside the headquarters of its corporate parent, Viacom, to protest recent changes in benefits. The walkout highlighted the concerns of a category of workers who are sometimes called permalancers: permanent freelancers who work like full-time employees but do not receive the same benefits. Waving signs that read "Shame on Viacom," the workers, most of them in their 20s, demanded that MTV Networks reverse a plan to reduce health and dental benefits for freelancers beginning On Jan. 1st. In a statement, MTV Networks noted that its benefits program for full-time employees had also undergone changes, and it emphasized that the plan for freelancers was still highly competitive within the industry. Many freelancers receive no corporate benefits. But some of the protesters asserted that corporations were competing to see which could provide the most mediocre health care coverage. Matthew Yonda, who works at Nickelodeon, held a sign that labeled the network "Sick-elodeon. " "I've worked here every day for three years-I'm not a freelancer," Mr. Yonda said. "They just call us freelancers in order to bar us from getting the same benefits as employees. " The changes to the benefits package were announced last Tuesday. Freelancers were told that they would become eligible for benefits after 160 days of work, beginning in January. While that eased previous eligibility rules, which required freelancers to work for 52 weeks before becoming eligible, it would have required all freelancers not yet eligible for benefits to start the waiting period over again on Jan. 1st. The 401 (k) plan was also removed. On Thursday, acknowledging the complaints, MTV Networks reinstated the 401 (k) plan and said freelancers who had worked consistently since March would be eligible. Fueled by a series of blog posts on the media Web site Gawker-the first post was headlined "The Viacom Permalance Slave System"-a loose cohort of freelancers created protest stickers and distributed walkout fliers last week. Caroline O'Hare, a unit manager who has worked for MTV for more than two years, said the new health care plan-with higher deductibles and a $ 2,000 cap on hospital expenses each year-had provoked outrage. "They think they can treat us like children that don't have families, mortgages or dreams of retirement," she said. Outside Viacom's headquarters, several workers held posters with the words, "There's too many of us to ignore. " It was unclear how many freelancers are on the company's payroll; an MTV Networks' spokeswoman said the figure was not known because it rises and falls throughout the year. The company has 5,500 full-time employees, excluding freelancers, around the world. Two freelancers and one full-time employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, estimated that the percentage of freelancers in some departments exceeded 75 percent. Another labor action is expected to take place outside Viacom later this week. Members of the Writers Guild of America, who have been on strike for five weeks, are expected to picket there on Thursday.

单选题Pain, unfortunately, is a horrible necessity of life. It protects people by alerting them to things that might injure them. But some long-term pain has nothing to do with any obvious injury. One estimate suggests that one in six adults suffer from a "chronic pain" condition. Steve McMahon, a pain researcher at King's College, London, says that if skin is damaged, for instance with a hot iron, an area of sensitivity develops around the outside of the burn where although untouched and undamaged by the iron the behavior of the nerve fibers is disrupted. As a result, heightened sensitivity and abnormal pain sensations occur in the surrounding skin. Chronic pain, he says, may similarly be caused not by damage to the body, but because weak pain signals become amplified. This would also help explain why chronic pains such as lower-back pain and osteoarthritis fail to respond well to traditional pain therapies. But now an entirely new kind of drug, called Tanezumab, has been developed. It is an antibody for a protein called nerve growth factor (NGF), which is vital for new nerve growth during development. NGF, it turns out, is also crucial in the regulation of the sensitisation of pain in chronic conditions. Kenneth Verburg, one of the researchers involved in the development of Tanezumab at Pfizer, says it is not exactly clear what role NGF plays in normal physiology, but after an injury which involves tissue damage and inflammation, levels of NGF increase dramatically. NGF seems to be involved in transmitting the pain signal. As a consequence, blocking NGF reduces chronic pain. Tanezumab must still complete the final stages of clinical trials before it can become a weapon in the toolkit for reducing human suffering. But unexpected pains do not always come from the body. According to Irene Tracey, a pain researcher at the University of Oxford, how pain is experienced also depends upon a person's state of mind. If successive patients suffer the same burn, the extent to which it hurts will depend on whether one is anxious, depressed, happy or distracted. Such ideas are being explored with brain scans which suggest that even if a low level of pain is being sent to the brain, the signal can be turned up by the "mind" itself. Indeed, patients can even be tricked into feeling pain. In one experiment volunteers were given a powerful analgesic and subjected to a painful stimulus—which, because of the analgesic, they could not feel. Then they were told the drug had worn off (although it had not), and subsequently complained that the stimulus hurt. People can, therefore, feel pain simply because it is expected. They can fail to feel pain for exactly the same reasons, for example when they are given placebos or are distracted. But although pain may be subjective, that does not mean the final experience is controlled solely by the mind. A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that genes play a role in determining sensitivity to pain. One gene, known as SCN9A, codes for a protein that allows the channels along which nerve signals are transmitted to remain active for longer and thus transmit more pain signals. It seems likely that this protein will attract a great deal more analgesic research. Variations in SCN9A may also explain why some patients prefer different classes of painkillers. Although pain may be a horrible necessity, there is no doubt that humanity could cope with far less of the chronic sort. Understanding how the mind, the body and people's genes interact to cause pain should bring more relief.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Climatic conditions are delicately adjusted to the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. If there were a change in the atmosphere--for example, in the relative proportions of atmospheric gases"-the climate would probably change also. A slight increase in water vapor, for instance, would increase the heat-retaining capacity of the atmosphere and would lead to a rise in global temperatures. In contrast, a large increase in water vapor would increase the thickness and extent of the cloud layer, reducing the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has an important effect on climatic change. Most of the Earth's incoming energy is short-wavelength radiation, which tends to pass through atmospheric carbon dioxide easily. The Earth, however, reradiates much of the received energy as long-wavelength radiation, which carbon dioxide absorbs and then remits toward the Earth. This phenomenon, known as the greenhouse effect, can result in an increase in the surface temperature of a planet. An extreme example of the effect is shown by Venus, a planet covered by heavy clouds composed mostly of carbon dioxide, whose surface temperatures have been measured at 43012. If the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is reduced, the temperature falls. According to one respectable theory, if the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration were halved, the Earth would become completely covered with ice. Another equally respectable theory, however, states that a halving of the carbon dioxide concentration would lead only to reduction in global temperatures of 312. If, because of an increase in forest fires or volcanic activity, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere increased, a warmer climate would be produced. Plant growth, which relies on both the warmth and the availability of carbon dioxide, would probably increase. As a consequence, plants would use more and more carbon dioxide. Eventually carbon dioxide levels would diminish and the climate, in turn, would become cooler. With reduced temperatures many plants would die; carbon dioxide would thereby be returned to the atmosphere and gradually the temperature would rise again. Thus, if this process occurred, there might be a long-term oscillation in the amount of carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere, with regular temperature increases and decreases of a set magnitude. Some climatologists argue that the burning of fossil fuels has raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and has caused a global temperature increase of at least 1 C. But a supposed global temperature rise of 112 may in reality be only several regional temperature increases, restricted to areas where there are many meteorological stations and mused simply by shifts in the pattern of atmospheric circulation. Other areas, for example, the Southern Hemisphere Oceanic Zone, may be experiencing an equivalent temperature decrease that is unrecognized because of the shortage of meteorological recording stations.

单选题With which of the following opinions would the author be likely to agree?______

单选题The working conditions of skilled workers in the meat-packing industry during the 1880’s were influenced by