单选题One thing that Ismael Matos, 23, says he's learned on his job as a special agent with the Geek Squad, is that there are no stupid questions—not even when a customer asks where the power button is. The goal, Matos says, is first to "strip out the jargon. " You know what he means: those terms like gigs, Ram, and motherboard that civilians don't typically use in everyday conversations. Once he establishes a common language with the customer, Matos can focus on building a relationshipone that he hopes will pay off in the future. Matos knows that clients often don't have the same skills he does. His customers ask for help not only with setting up new computers and installing software, but also with digital cameras, wireless Internet access and even getting their iPod synced with iTunes. We live in the age of Web2.0, when Internet viewers are fast becoming content creators. We may log in to social networking sites such as Digg and Technorati, rate or even upload videos on YouTube, and contribute and edit information on collaborate websites known as wikis. But members of this expanding plugged-in population aren't necessarily up to speed with the language of the web—or understand the technical lingo of the sales or customer service people they're turning to for assistance. According to a "Cyber Stress" survey of 1,001 American broadband Internet service users, 46 percent said the typical tech support person uses an excess of technical language, and 61 percent said they would prefer a "computer therapist" who is compassionate and easy to talk to. A question that online public relations strategist Sally Falkow says she's hearing often these days is, "How do we cope with all this?" she tells people, "There's no way you can escape this. There's a big conversation going on," and it's important to learn how to be part of it. If you're at the earliest stage of the learning curve, start by reading technology-oriented columns and articles in magazines, newspapers and websites that are written for a general audience. Move up to more tech-oriented e-letters as you build a foundation. As you come across new tells, look them up online. Definitions at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written and edited by web users, may be helpful. You should also start associating with people who can help explain things. Look for groups that sponsor seminars or find a supportive online community. Don't be afraid to guide your helper. Explain what you need to know, ask him or her to slow down and speak in basic terms.

单选题For many years, any discussion of reparations to compensate the descendants of African slaves for 246 years of bondage and another century of legalized discrimination was dismissed. Many whites and blacks alike scoffed at the idea, reasoning that slavery is part of the past that would only unleash new demons if it were resurrected. Opponents contend that the fledgling reparations movement overlooks many important facts. First, they assert, reparations usually are paid to direct victims, as was the case when the U. S. government apologized and paid compensation to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. Similarly, Holocaust (;k2,V~-~,) survivors have received payments from the Germans. In addition, not all blacks were slaves, and an estimated 3,000 were slave owners. Also, many immigrants not only came to the United States after slavery ended, but they also faced discrimination. Should they pay reparations, too? Or should they receive them? And regardless of how much slave labor contributed to the United States' wealth, opponents contend, blacks benefit from that wealth today. As a group, African-Americans are the best educated, wealthiest blacks on the planet. But that attitude is slowly changing. At least 10 cities, including Chicago, Detroit and Washington, have passed resolutions in the past two years urging federal hearings into the impact of slavery. Mainstream civil rights groups such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference regularly raise the issue. The surging interest in reparations parallels a heightened sensitivity to the horrors of slavery, in which as many as 6 million Africans perished in the journey to the Americas alone. There also is growing attention being paid to the huge economic bounty that slavery created for private companies and the country as a whole. Earlier this year, Aetna Inc. apologized for selling insurance policies that compensated slave owners for financial losses when their slaves died. Last summer, the Hartford Courant in Connecticut printed a front-page apology for the profits it made from running ads for the sale of slaves and the capture of runaways. Next month, a new California law will require insurance companies to disclose any slave insurance policies they may have issued. The state also is requiring University of California officials to assemble a team of scholars to research the history of slavery and report how current California businesses benefited. Proponents of reparations argue that, even for nearly a century after emancipation in 1865, blacks legally were still excluded from the opportunities that became the cornerstones for the white middle-class.

单选题What can be inferred from the passage?

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The author of some forty novels, a number of plays, volumes of verse, historical, critical and autobiographical works, an editor and translator, Jack Lindsay is clearly an extraordinarily prolific writer--a fact which can easily obscure his very real distinction in some of the areas into which he bas ventured. His co editorship of Vision in Sydney in the early 1920's, for example, is still felt to have introduced a significant period in Australian culture, while his study of Kickens written in 1950 is highly regarded. But of all his work it is probably the novel to which he has made his most significant contribution. Since 1936 when, to use his own words in Fanfrolico and after, he "reached bedrock", Lindsay bas maintained a consistent Marxist viewpoint--and it is this viewpoint which if nothing else has guaranteed his novels a minor but certainly not negligible place in modern British literature. Feeling that "the historical novel is a form that bas a limitless future as a fighting weapon and as a cultural instrument" (New Masses, January 1937), Lindsay first attempted to formulate his Marxist convictions in fiction mainly set in the past: particularly in his trilogy in English novels--1949 (dealing with the Digger and Leveller movements), Lost Birthright (the Wilkesite agitations), and Men of Forth-Eight (written in 1939, the Chartist and revolutionary uprisings in Europe). Basically these works set out, with most success in the first volume, to vivify the historical traditions behind English Socialism and attempted to demonstrate that it stood, in Lindsay's words, for the "true completion of the national destiny." Although the war years saw the virtual disintegration of the left-wing writing movement of the 1930s, Lindsay himself carried on: delving into contemporary affairs in We Shall Return and Beyond Terror, novels in which the epithets formerly reserved for the evil capitalists or Franco's soldiers have been transferred rather crudely to the German troops. After the war, Lindsay continued to write mainly about the present--trying with varying degrees of success to come to terms with the unradical political realities of post-war England. In the series of novels known collectively as The British Way, and beginning with Betrayed Spring in 1953, it seemed at first as if his solution was simply to resort to more and more obvious authorial manipulation and heavy-banded didacticism. Fortunately, however, from Revolt of the Sons, this process was reversed, as Lindsay began to show an increasing tendency to ignore party solutions, to fail indeed to give anything but the most elementary political consciousness to his characters, so that in his latest (and what appears to be his last) contemporary novel, Choice of Times, his hero, Colin, ends on a note of desperation: "Everything must be different, I can't live this way any longer. But how can I change it, how?" To his credit as an artist, Lindsay doesn't give him any explicit answer.

单选题The question of parenting has become of increasing interest to economists. At the American Economic Association"s annual meeting in Denver this year, for example, there was a 1 on the effect of mothers" employment on their children, as well as household 2 and child development. Economists are 3 increasingly on studies from epigenetics, which demonstrate the way parenting and other 4 factors transform genes. But 5 most debates regarding nature 6 nurture tend to look at what happens to people during childhood, Janet Currie, an economist at Columbia University, has looked at the effects that 7 might have on children even before they are born. In a paper 8 as the Richard T. Ely lecture at the A. E. A. meeting, she reviewed studies looking at 9 better maternal education and government food 10 can help raise birth weights among babies, an indicator that can 11 future health. Stopping smoking or taking drugs, not 12 , also improves birth weights. In examining the effects of pollution on birth weight, she 13 that one of the reasons poor, minority mothers tend to live 14 to polluted areas is that such neighborhoods tend to be viewed as blighted by more 15 and white residents, and that 16 home prices or rents are more 17 for those living on low incomes. She also posited the 18 that "some groups are less able to process and act on information about hazards." Ms. Currie 19 that because changes made by mothers or families while a baby is in the womb can affect birth weight, and in 20 , future health, "we cannot assume that differences that are present at birth reflect unchangeable, genetic factors."

单选题The approximate date of the shipwreck could be decided from ______.

单选题The author directs attention to "Hua Mei', the baby panda born in the San Diego Zoo, in order to

单选题Britain's undeclared general election campaign has already seen the politicians trading numbers as boxers trade punches. There is nothing new in such statistical slanging matches (相互谩骂). What is new is an underestimation of worry about what has been happening to official statistics under the Labour government. One of the most important figures for Gordon Brown when presenting his pre-election budget on March 16th was the current-budget balance. This is the gap between current revenues and current spending. It matters to the chancellor of the exchequer (财政部长) because he is committed to meeting his own "golden rule" of borrowing only to invest, so he has to ensure that the current budget is in balance or surplus over the economic cycle. Mr. Brown told MPs that he would meet the golden rule for the current cycle with ~ 6 billion ( $11.4 billion) to spare--a respectable-sounding margin, though much less than in the past. However, the margin would have been halved but for an obscure technical change announced in February by the Office for National Statistics to the figures for road maintenance of major highways. The ONS said that the revision was necessary because it had been double-counting this spending within the current budget. If this were an isolated incident, then it might be disregarded. But it is not the first time that the ONS has made decisions that appear rather convenient for the government. Mr. Brown aims to meet another fiscal rule, namely to keep public net debt below 40% of GDP, again over the economic cycle. At present he is meeting it but his comfort room would be reduced if the ￡ 21 billion borrowings of Network Rail were included as part of public debt. They are not thanks to a controversial decision by the ONS to classify the rail-infrastructure corporation within the private sector, even though the National Audit Office, Parliament's watchdog, said its borrowings were in fact government liabilities. This makes it particularly worrying that the official figures can show one thing, whereas the public experiences another. One of the highest-profile targets for the NHS is that no patient should spend more than four hours in a hospital accident and emergency department. Government figures show that by mid-2004, the target was being met for 96% of patients. But according to a survey of 55,000 patients by the Healthcare Commission, an independent body, only 77% of patients said they stayed no more than four hours in A&E. One way to help restore public confidence in official statistics would be to make the ONS independent, as the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have suggested. Another would be for the National Audit Office to assess how the government has been performing against targets, as the Public Administration Committee has recommended.

单选题The majority of successful senior managers do not closely follow the classical rational model of first clarifying goals, assessing the problem, formulating options, estimating likelihood of success, making a decision, and only then taking action to implement the decision. Rather, in their day-by-day tactical activities, these senior executives rely on what is vaguely termed "intuition" to manage a network of interrelated problems that require them to deal with ambiguity, inconsistency, novelty, and surprise; and to integrate action into the process of thinking. Generations of writers on management have recognized that some practicing managers rely heavily on intuition. In general, however, such writers display a poor grasp of what intuition is. Some see it as the opposite of rationality; others view it as an excuse of capriciousness. Isenberg"s recent research on the cognitive processes of senior managers reveals that managers" intuition is neither of these. Rather, senior managers use intuition in at least five distinct ways. First, they intuitively sense when a problem exists. Second, managers rely on intuition to perform well-learned behavior patterns rapidly. This intuition is not arbitrary or irrational, but is based on years of painstaking practice and personal experience that build skills. A third function of intuition is to synthesize isolated bits of data and practice into an integrated picture, often in an "Aha!" experience. Fourth, some managers use intuition as a check on the results of more rational analysis. Most senior executives are familiar with the formal decision analysis models and tools, and those who use such systematic methods for reaching decisions are occasionally suspicious of solutions suggested by these methods which run counter to their sense of the correct course of action. Finally, managers can use intuition to bypass in-depth analysis and move rapidly to find out a plausible solution. Used in this way, intuition is an almost instantaneous cognitive process in which a manager recognizes familiar patterns. One of the implications of the intuitive style of executive management is that "thinking" is inseparable from acting. Since managers often "know" what is right before they can analyze and explain it, they frequently act first and explain later. Analysis is invariably tied to action in thinking/acting cycles, in which managers develop thoughts about their companies and organizations not by analyzing a problematic situation and then acting, but by acting and analyzing in close concert. Given the great uncertainty of many of the management issues that they face, senior managers often initiate a course of action simply to learn more about an issue. They then use the results of the action to develop a more complete understanding of the issue. One implication of thinking/acting cycles is that action is often part of defining the problem, not just of implementing the solution. (454 words)

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} A recent history of the Chicago meat-packing industry and its workers examines how the industry grew from its appearance in the 1830's through the early 1890's. Meatpackers, the author argues, had good wages, working conditions, and prospects for advancement within the packinghouses, and did not cooperate with labor agitators since labor relations were so harmonious. Because the history maintains that conditions were above standard for the era, the frequency of labor disputes, especially in the mid-1880's, is not accounted for. The work ignores the fact that the 1880's were crucial years in American labor history, and that the' packinghouse workers’ efforts were part of the national movement for labor reform. In fact, other historical sources for the late nineteenth century record deteriorating housing and high disease and infant mortality rates in the industrial community, due to low wages and unhealthy working conditions. Additional data from the University of Chicago suggest that the packing houses were dangerous places to work. The government investigation commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt which eventually led to the adoption of the 1906 Meat Inspection Act found the packinghouses unsanitary, while social workers observed that most of the workers were poorly paid and overworked. The history may be too optimistic because most of its data date from the 1880 's at the latest, and the information provided from that decade is insufficiently analyzed. Conditions actually declined in the 1880's, and continued to decline after the 1880's, due to a reorganization of the packing process and a massive influx of unskilled workers. The 'deterioration, in worker status, partly a result of the new availability of unskilled and hence cheap labor, is not discussed. Though a detailed account of work in the packing houses is attempted, the author fails to distinguish between the wages and conditions for skilled workers and for those unskilled laborers who comprised the majority of the industry's workers from the 1880's on. While conditions for the former were arguably tolerable due to the strategic importance of skilled workers in the complicated slaughtering, cutting and packing process (though worker complaints about the rate and conditions of work were frequent), pay and conditions for the latter were wretched. The author's misinterpretation of the origins of the feelings the meat-packers had for their industrial neighborhood may account for the history's faulty generalizations. The pride and contentment the author remarks upon were, arguably, less the products of the industrial world of the packers—the giant yards and the intricate plants—than of the unity and vibrancy of the ethnic cultures that formed a viable community on Chicago's South Side. Indeed, the strength of this community succeeded in generating a social movement that effectively confronted the problems of the industry that provided its livelihood.