单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Halfway through" The Rebel Sell," the authors pause to make fun of" free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not, in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But" a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earth-worm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark corner of the barn. Only about 15% of" free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them. This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that" the counterculture," in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud, the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville"," The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world's funniest joke. Why range so widely? The authors' beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization, or buy fair-trade coffee and flee-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein ("No Logo") and Alissa Quart("Branded"), come in for special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions. Anticipating criticism, perhaps, Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural" arms race": each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors'. Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. (This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure.) But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticise every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain, for homogenisation, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathise with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were. Still,it would be a shame if the book' s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War Ⅱ critiques of modem society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humour to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.

单选题The example of Telewest is mentioned to show that

单选题Which of the following statements about manufacturing before 1870 can be inferred from the passage?______

单选题Vacation schools and extracurricular activities are mentioned in Para. 2 to illustrate alternatives to formal education pro- vided ______ by public schools.

单选题Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the great disparity between the native population of America in 1492--new estimates of which jump as high as 100 million, or approximately one-sixth of the human race at that time--and the few million full-blooded Native Americans alive at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that chronic disease was an important factor in the sharp decline, and it is highly probable that the greatest killer was epidemic disease, especially as manifested in virgin-soil epidemics. Virgin-soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless. That virgin-soil epidemics were important in American history is strongly indicated by evidence that a number of dangerous maladies--smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more--were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World. The effects of their sudden introduction are demonstrated in the early chronicles of America, which contain reports of horrible epidemics and steep population declines, confirmed in many cases by quantitative analyzes of Spanish tribute records and other sources. The evidence provided by the documents of British and French colonies is not as definitive because the conquerors of those areas did not establish permanent settlements and began to keep continuous records until the seventeenth century, by which time the worst epidemics had probably already taken place. Furthermore, the British tended to drive the native populations away, rather than to enslave them as the Spaniards did, so that the epidemics of British America occurred beyond the range of colonists' direct observation. Even so, the surviving records of North America do contain references to deadly epidemics among the native population. In 1616--1619 an epidemic, possibly of pneumonic plague, swept coastal New England, killing as many as nine out of ten, During the 1630's smallpox, the disease most fatal to the Native American people, eliminated half the population of the Huron and Iroquois confederations. In the 1820's fever ruined the people of the Columbia River area, killing eight out of ten of them. Unfortunately, the documentation of these and other epidemics is slight and frequently unreliable, and it is necessary to supplement what little we do know with evidence from recent epidemics among Native Americans. For example, in 1952 an outbreak of measles among the Native American inhabitants of Ungava Bay, Quebec, affected 99 percent of the population and killed 7 percent, even though some had the benefit of modern medicine. Cases such as this demonstrate that even diseases that are not normally fatal can have destroying consequences when they strike an immunologically defenseless community.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} "What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?" asks an old software industry joke. Answer: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. The boss of Oracle is hardly alone among corporate chiefs in having a reputation for being rather keen on himself. Indeed, until the bubble burst and the public turned nasty at the start of the decade, the cult of the celebrity chief executive seemed to demand bossly narcissism, as evidence that a firm was being led by an all-conquering hero. Narcissus in Greek myth met a nasty end, of course. And in recent years, boss-worship has come to be seen as bad for business. In his management besteller, Good to Great, Jim Collins argued that the truly successful bosses were not the self-proclaimed stars who adorn the covers of Forbes and Fortune, but instead self-effacing, thoughtful, monkish sorts who lead by inspiring example. A statistical answer may be at hand. For the first time, a new study, "It's All About Me", to be presented next week at the annual gathering of the American Academy of Management, offers a systematic, empirical analysis of what effect narcissistic bosses have on the firms they run. The authors, Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambriek, of Pennsylvania State University, examined narcissism in the upper echelons of 105 firms in the computer, and software industries. To do this, they had to solve a practical problem: studies of narcissism have hitherto relied on surveying individuals personally, something for which few chief executives are likely to have time or inclination. So the authors devised an index of narcissism using six publicly available indicators obtainable without the co-operation of the boss. These are: the prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report; his prominence in company press releases; the length of his "Who's Who" entry; the frequency of his use of the first person singular in interviews; and the ratios of his cash and non-cash compensation to those of the firm's second-highest paid executive. Narcissism naturally drives people to seek positions of power and influence, and because great self-esteem helps your professional advance, say the authors, chief executives will tend on average to be more narcissistic than the general population. How does that affect a firm? Messrs Chatterjee and Hambrick found that highly narcissistic bosses tended to make bigger changes in the use of important resources, such as research and development, or in spending and leverage; they carried out more and bigger mergers and acquisitions; and their results were both more extreme (more big wins or big losses) and more volatile than those of firms run by their humbler peers. For shareholders, that could be good or bad.

单选题By "Gossip also is a form of social bonding" (Para. 5), Professor Aaron Ben-Ze'ev means gossip______.

单选题Every year 100 million holiday-makers are drawn to the Mediterranean. With one third of the world's tourist trade, it is the most popular of all the holiday destinations: it is also the most polluted. It has only 1 percent of the world's sea surface, but carries more than half the oil and tar floating on the waters. Thousands of factories pour their poison into the Mediterranean, and almost every city, town and village on the coast sluices its sewage, untreated, into the sea. The result is that the Mediterranean, which nurtured so many civilizations, is gravely ill-the first of the seas to fall victim to the abilities and attitudes that evolved around it. And the population does not merely stifle the life of the sea-it threatens the people who inhabit and visit its shores. Typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, polio, viral hepatitis and food poisoning are endemic in the area, and there are periodic outbreaks of cholera. The mournful litany of disease is caused by sewage. Eight-five percent of the waste from the Mediterranean's 120 coastal cities is pushed out into the waters where their people and visitors bathe and fish. What is more, most cities just drop it in straight off the beach; rare indeed are the places like Cannes and Tel Aviv which pipe it even half a mile offshore. Less than 100, 000 of Greece's four million coastal people have their sewage properly treated-and Greece, is one of the cleaner countries of the northern shore. The worst parts of the sea are Israeli/Lebanon coast and between Barcelona and Genoa, which flushes out over 200 tons of sewage each year for every mile of its length. Not surprisingly, vast areas of the shallows are awash with bacteria and it doesn't take long for these to reach people. Professor William Brumfit of the Royal Free Hospital once calculated that anyone who goes for a swim in the Mediterranean has a one in seven chance of getting some sort of disease. Other scientists say this is an overestimate; but almost all of them agree that bathers are at risk. An even greater danger lurks in the seductive seafood dishes that add so much interest to holiday menu. Shellfish are prime carriers of many of the most vicious diseases of the area. They often grow amid pollution. And even if they don't they are frequently infected by the popular practice of "freshening them up" -throwing filthy water over them in markets. Industry adds its own poisons. Factories cluster round the coastline, and even the most modern rarely has proper waste-treatment plant. They do as much damage to the sea as sewage. Fifteen thousand factories foul the Italian Lihurian Riviera. Sixty thousand pollute the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia, Sicily and the west Italian coast! The lagoon of Venice alone receives the effluents of 76 factories. Thousands of tons of pesticides are blown off the fields into the sea, detergents from millions of sinks kill fish, and fertilizers, flushed out to sea, nourish explosions of plankton which cover bathers with itchy slime. Then there is the oil-130, 000 tons pouring each year from ships, 115, 000 tons more from industries round the shore. Recent studies show that the Mediterranean is four times as polluted as the north Atlantic, 20 times as bad as the north-east Pacific. Apart from the nine-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean is landlocked, virtually unable to cleanse itself. It takes 80 years for the water to be renewed, through the narrow, shallow straits, far too slow a process to cope with the remorseless rush of pollution.

单选题Manners nowadays in metropolitan cities like London are practically non-existent. It is nothing for a big, strong schoolboy to elbow an elderly woman aside in the dash for the last remaining seat on the tube or bus, much less stand up and offer his seat to her, as he ought. In fact, it is saddening to note that if a man does offer his seat to an older woman, it is nearly always a Continental man or one from the older generation. This question of giving up seats in public transport is much argued about by young men, who say that, since women have claimed equality, they no longer deserve to be treated with courtesy, and that those who go out to work should take their turn in the rat race like anyone else. Women have never claimed to be physically as strong as men. Even if it is not agreed, however, that young men should stand up for younger women, the fact remains that courtesy should be shown to the old. the sick and the burdened. Conditions in travel are really very hard on everyone, we know, but hardship is surely no excuse. Sometimes one wonders what would have been the behavior of these about young men in a packed refugee train or a train on its way to a prisoner-camp during the war. Would they have considered it only right and their proper due to keep the best places for themselves then? Older people, tired and irritable from a day's work, are not angels, either--far from it. Many a brisk argument or an insulting quarrel breaks out as the weary queues push and shove each other to gel on buses and tubes. One cannot commend this, of course, but one does feel there is just a little more excuse. If cities are to remain pleasant places to live in at all, however, it seems urgent, not only that communications in transport should be improved, but also that communication between human beings should be kept smooth and polite. All over cities, it seems that people are too tired and too rushed to be polite. Shop assistants won't bother to assist, taxi drivers shout at each other as they dash dangerously round corners, bus conductors pull the bell before their desperate passengers have had time to get on or off the bus. and so on and so on. It seems to us that it is up to the young and strong to do their small part to stop such deterioration. Notes: much less 更不用说。Continental man 欧洲大陆上的人。rat race 激烈的竞争。be lost to 全然不顾。 all too 实在太。be hard on sh. 对...... 太严峻。due n.应该得到的东西。communications In transport 运输工具。won't bother to do sth. 不愿费心去做某事。pull the hell (售票员)拉铃(以便让司机开动车辆)。do one's part 尽某人的责任。

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.

单选题What does the "invisible hand" ( Paragraph 5 ) refer to?

单选题Elen Evans' technology of new protein design may prove useful