单选题 Menorca or Majorca? It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is. Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the Internet. Instead of buying a ready-made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator's brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute. com for ￡ 577 million ($1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms. This has led some to sound the death knell for high-street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre-tax profit rise by 16% to ￡ 114 million ($195 million) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the Internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years. Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay. Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the Internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services. This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, too? The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference.

单选题The writer thinks that academic work has recently become more specialized because

单选题The Charles de Gaulle Airport is located ______.

单选题Which of the following actions is not what the I. O.C. will take to deal with the drugs?

单选题Robert F. Kennedy once said that a country"s GDP measures "everything except that which makes life worthwhile." With Britain voting to leave the European Union, and GDP already predicted to slow as a result, it is now a timely moment to assess what he was referring to. The question of GDP and its usefulness has annoyed policymakers for over half a century. Many argue that it is a flawed concept. It measures things that do not matter and miss things that do. By most recent measures, the UK"s GDP has been the envy of the Western World, with record low unemployment and high growth figures. If everything was going so well, then why did over 17 million people vote for Brexit, despite the warnings about what it could do to their country"s economic prospects? A recent annual study of countries and their ability to convert growth into well-being sheds some light on that question. Across the 163 countries measured, the UK is one of the poorest performers in ensuring that economic growth is translated into meaningful improvement for its citizens. Rather than just focusing on GDP, over 40 different sets of criteria from health, education and civil society engagement have been measured to get a more rounded assessment of how countries are performing. While all of these countries face their own challenges, there are a number of consistent themes. Yes, there has been a budding economic recovery since the 2008 global crash, but in key indicators in areas such as health and education, major economies have continued to decline. Yet this isn"t the case with all countries. Some relatively poor European countries have seen huge improvements across measures including civil society, income equality and the environment. This is a lesson that rich countries can learn: When GDP is no longer regarded as the sole measure of a country"s success, the world looks very different. So, what Kennedy was referring to was that while GDP has been the most common method for measuring the economic activity of nations, as a measure, it is no longer enough. It does not include important factors such as environmental equality or education outcomes—all things that contribute to a person"s sense of well-being. The sharp hit to growth predicted around the world and in the UK could lead to a decline in the everyday services we depend on for our well-being and for growth. But policymakers who refocus efforts on improving well-being rather than simply worrying about GDP figures could avoid the forecasted doom and may even see progress.

单选题A moment's drilling by the dentist may make us nervous and upset. Many of us cannot stand pain. To avoid the pain of a drilling that may last perhaps a minute or two, we demand the "needle"— a shot of novocaine (奴佛卡因) -that deadens the nerves around the tooth. Now it' s true that the human body has developed its millions of nerves to be highly aware of what goes on both inside and outside of it. This helps us adjust to the world. Without our nerves—and our brain, which is a bundle of nerves— we wouldn't know what's happening. But we pay for our sensitivity. We can feel pain when the slightest thing is wrong with any part of our body. The history of torture is based on the human body being open to pain. But there is a way to handle pain. Look at the Indian fakir(行僧) who sits on a bed of nails. Fakirs can put a needle right through an arm, and feel no pain; This ability that some humans have developed to handle pain should give us ideas about how the mind can deal with pain. The big thing in withstanding pain is our attitude toward it. If the dentist says, "This will hurt a little, it helps us to accept the pain. By staying relaxed,' and by treating the pain as an interesting sensation, we' can handle the pain without falling apart. After all; although pain is an unpleasant sensation, it is still a sensation, and sensations are the stuff of life.

单选题It may not have generated much interest outside energy and investment circles, but a recent comment by Tidewater, Inc. president Dean Taylor sent earthquakes through the New Orleans business community. In June, Taylor told the Houston Chronicle that the international marine services company--the world' s largest operator of ships serving the offshore oil industry--was seriously considering moving its headquarters, along with scores of administrative jobs, from the Crescent City to Houston. "We have a lot of sympathy for the city," Taylor said. "But our shareholders don' t pay us to have sympathy. They pay us to have results for them. " It was the last thing the hurricane-scarred city needed to hear. Tidewater was founded here a little more than 50 years ago, and kept its main office in New Orleans throughout the oil bust of the 1980s and the following decades of industry consolidation, when dozens of energy firms all but abandoned New Orleans for greener pastures on the Texas coast. In the nearly two years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city, the pace of exodus has accelerated, complicating New Orleans' halting recovery; according to the local business weekly CityBusiness, the metropolitan area has lost 12 of the 23 publicly traded companies headquartered here, taking white-collar jobs, corporate community support and sorely needed taxpayers with them--and threatening to leave the city even more dependent on a tourism-based economy than it was before the storm. Making matters worse, some observers say, is the city leadership' s apparent indifference to the bloodletting. Just weeks after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Mayor Ray Nagin, then in the very early stages of a heated reelection bid, dismissed warnings that many companies, like displaced residents, might opt to relocate. Nagin said he hoped they would stay. "But if they don' t, "he said with typical glibness, " I'll send them a postcard. " The comment might have been written off as one of Nagin' s many verbal missteps. But in the months that followed, the warnings turned out in many cases to be true, even as the city' s rebuilding effort languished, infrastructure repairs limped along, the state reimbursement program for damaged homes faltered and the New Orleans' infamous crime rate made a sickening comeback. New Orleans " wasn' t considered a great city for doing business before the storm. People were always dribbling out, " says Peter Ricchiuti, a professor of economics at Tulane University. While many of the companies that made it through the storm could stand to benefit from the city' s recovery, he says, Katrina may have hastened the loss of high-paying energy jobs. "We' re losing the white-collar jobs and keeping the blue-collar jobs," he says. "We' re becoming much more of a blue-collar oil industry. " One of the latest examples is Chevron Corp., which is building new offices in the northern suburbs, 40 miles north of the city across Lake Pontchartrain, and plans to transfer 550 employees from New Orleans to Covington by the end of the year. That would take well- paid people out of downtown New Orleans, a move that will impact the central business district' s economy. "We made the decision in May, 2006, when our employees were making important housing decisions," says Qi Wilson, a Chevron spokesperson. The company, like many employees, decided the north shore offered better security should another hurricane strike, along with fewer of the post-Katrina headaches that still plague the city. The move "will make it easier to retain the talent we have, and to attract new talent," Wilson says.

单选题In the eyes of the author, conventional opinion on the strategic importance of the Gulf oil is ______.

单选题Which of the following may archaeologists currently place least importance on?

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} For Tony Blair, home is a messy sort of place, where the prime minister's job is not to uphold eternal values but to force through some unpopular changes that may make the country work a bit better. The area where this is most obvious, and where it matters most, is the public services. Mr Blair faces a difficulty here which is partly of his own making. By focusing his last election campaign on the need to improve hospitals, schools, transport and policing, he built up expectations. Mr Blair has said many times that reforms in the way the public services work need to go alongside increases in cash. Mr Blair has made his task harder by committing {{U}}a classic negotiating error{{/U}}. Instead of extracting concessions from the other side before promising his own, he has pledged himself to higher spending on public services without getting a commitment to change from the unions. Why, given that this pledge has been made, should the health unions give ground in return? In a speech on March 20th, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, said that "the something-for-nothing days are over in our public services and there can be no blank cheques." But the government already seems to have given health workers a blank cheque. Nor are other ministries conveying quite the same message as the treasury. On March 19th, John Hutton, a health minister, announced that cleaners and catering staff in new privately-funded hospitals working for the National Health service will still be government employees, entitled to the same pay and conditions as other health-service workers. Since one of the main ways in which the government hopes to reform the public sector is by using private providers, and since one of the main ways in which private providers are likely to be able to save money is by cutting labor costs, this move seems to undermine the government's strategy. Now the government faces its hardest fight. The police need reforming more than any other public service. Half of them, for instance, retire early, at a cost of ￡1 billion ($ 1.4% billion) a year to the taxpayer. The police have voted 10-1 against proposals from the home secretary, David Blunkett, to reform their working practices. This is a fight the government has to win. If the police get away with it, other public service workers will reckon they can too. And, if they all get away it, Mr Blair's domestic policy--which is what voters are most likely to judge him on a the next election--will be a failure.

单选题One of the comical moments in the early history of printing occurred in 1631, when the English printer Robert Barker produced an edition of the scriptures which became known as the "Wicked Bible." This edition contained a misprint of the seventh commandmem. One thousand copies were printed and ready for publication before someone noticed that the commandment had been changed to "Thou shalt commit adultery." Nothing much came of it. The printer was fined, the copies destroyed and the moral fiber of the nation remained intact. But what happens when the verse at issue is not merely a printer's error but an ancient interpolation into an even more ancient text? Such was the case with 1 John 5:7, the biblical proof-text for the doctrine of the Trinity. Erasmus, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke, among others, challenged the text's authenticity. When Erasmus left the verse out of the first edition of his monumental Greek New Testament (1516), he was roundly criticized for encouraging heresies, schisms and conflicts. Erasmus's critics knew that approaching the Bible in a scholarly fashion was dangerous: even the most pious attempts at rational understanding of scripture could result in skepticism or atheism. How can one appraise the Bible critically and still maintain its authority?. In his engaging and very thorough book, David Katz explores the ways this question was addressed in England from the Reformation onward. A professor at Tel Aviv University, Katz is the author of The Jews in the History of England, 1485-1850 and a host of books and articles on early- modem skepticism and religion. In God's Last Words, Katz maintains that every era responds to the Bible differently based on shifting cultural assumptions, and he examines the "lens through which the Bible was read" in various historical moments. While Reformation leaders accepted the transparency of the Bible's message, by the late 17th century, this view could no longer be maintained, Katz states. During the 18th century the Bible came to be regarded as just another literary text--one which increasingly had to conform to contemporary standards of realism. As Darwin's theories became widely known, 19th-century readers applied an evolutionary model to the Bible and began m see it as the product of a primitive mentality very different from their own. These new ways of reading the Bible seemed to destroy its authority completely until the fundamentalist movement reasserted the old Protestant belief in the Bible's sole authority.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Scientists have long warned that some level of global warming is a done deal—due in large part to heat-trapping greenhouse gases humans already have pumped skyward. Now, however, researchers are fleshing out how much future warming and sea-level rise the world has triggered. The implicit message: "We can't stop this, so how do we live with it?" says Thomas Wigley, a climate researcher at NCAR. One group, led by Gerald Meehl at NCAR, used two state-of-the-art climate models to explore what could happen if the world had held atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases steady since 2000. The results: Even if the world had slammed on the brakes five years ago, global average temperatures would rise by about 1 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century. Sea levels would rise by another 4 inches over 20th-century increases. Rising sea-levels would continue well beyond 2100, even without adding water from melting glaciers and ice sheets. The rise highlights the oceans' enormous capacity to absorb heat and its slow reaction to changes in atmospheric conditions. The team ran each model several times with a range of "what if" concentrations, as well as observed concentrations, for comparison. Temperatures eventually level out, Dr. Meehl says in reviewing his team's results. "But sea-level increases keep ongoing. The relentless nature of sea-level rise is pretty daunting." Dr. Wigley took a slightly different approach with a simpler model. He ran simulations that capped concentrations, at 2000 levels. If concentrations are held constant, warming could exceed 1.8 degrees F. by 2400. The two researchers add that far from holding steady, concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise. Thus, at best, the results point to the least change people can expect, they say. The idea that some level of global climate change from human activities is inevitable is not new. But the word has been slow to make its way into the broader debate. "Many people don't realize we are committed right now to a significant amount of global warming and sea-level rise. The longer we wait, the more climate change we are committed to in the future," Meehl says. While the concept of climate-change commitment isn't new, these fresh results "tell us what's possible and what's realistic" and that for the immediate future, "prevention is not on the table," says Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. To Pielke and others, this means adaptation should be given a much higher priority that it's received to date. "There's a cultural bias in favor of prevention," he says. But any sound policy includes preparation as well, he adds. "We have the scientific and technological knowledge we need to improve adaptation and apply that knowledge globally."

单选题Ask any employee at an level in any company what they dislike about their job and somewhere on the list you will find a complaint about the system of performance appraisals. It does seem strange that an idea which was supposed to benefit both individuals and the company should be so universally disliked, but the staff appraisal is now one of the biggest causes of dissatisfaction at work. In the United States there have even been cases of unhappy workers taking their employers to court over appraisal interviews. It is in a company's interest to combat this situation, but, before reversing the appraisal's negative associations, an organization needs to pinpoint the underlying reasons which have contributed to them. Problems with appraisals can fall into two main areas--those arising from the scheme itself and those arising from the implementation and understanding of that scheme. Naturally it is easier to tackle those in the former category; indeed, some companies have developed schemes following legal guidelines. These guidelines suggest that a successful scheme should have a clear appeal process, that any negative feedback should be accompanied by "evidence" such as dates, times and outcomes and that, most importantly, ratings should reflect specific measurable elements of the job requirements. It is not always necessary to resort to legal advice however. Some changes to current schemes are simply a matter of logic. For instance, if employees are constantly encouraged to work in teams and to assume joint responsibility for their successes and failures, it makes little sense for the appraisals to focus on individuals, as this may lead to resentments and create divisions within the group. It is possible, and in some cases more suitable, to arrange appraisals where performance is rated for the group. Staff also need to be educated about the best way to approach appraisals. Managers often find that they are uncomfortable being asked to take on a more supportive role than they are used to without having had any training. Those being appraised may see it as a chance to air their grievances and highlight the company's failings rather than consider their own role. Both parties view the process as a necessary evil, to be gone through once or twice a year, and then forgotten about. The importance given to the appraisal stems from the fact that, despite all the talk of the interview being a chance for management and employees to come together and exchange ideas, set joint targets and improve the way decisions are reached, the reality is that they are often nothing more than the pretext on which pay rises are given, or not given. Pay is, of course, a subject that always leads to problems. Given the problems associated with staff appraisals, why is it that, with no legal requirement, companies continue to run them? The answer is simple, it is impossible to manage something you know nothing about. As any Human Resources manager can tell you, the best way to learn about someone is to talk to them. Effective people management relies on knowledge and appraisals are still the best way to build up that bank of knowledge.

单选题Why does globalization will lead some countries to be under the control of other countries?

单选题In a three-month period last year, two Brooklynites had to be cut out of their apartments and carried to hospital on stretchers designed for transporting small whales. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) argues that it was not their combined 900kg bulk that made them ill. Obesity, according to NAAFA, is not bad for you. And, even if it was, there is nothing to be done about it, because genes dictate weight. Attempting to eat less merely slows metabolism, having people as chubby as ever. This is the fatlash movement that causes America's slimming industry so much pain. In his book Bin Fat Lies (Ballantine, 1996), Glenn Gaesser says that no study yet has convincingly shown that weight is an independent cause of health problems. Fatness does not kill people; things like hypertension, coronary heart diseases and cancer do. Michael Fumento, author of The Fat of the Land (Viking, 1997), an anti-fatlash diatribe, compares Dr Gaesser's logic with saying that the guillotine did not kill Louis XVI: Rather, it was the severing of his vertebrae, the cutting of all the blood vessels in his neck, and.., the trauma caused by his head dropping several feet into a wicker basket. Being fat kills in several ways. It makes people far more likely to suffer from heart disease or high blood pressure. Even moderate obesity increases the chance of contracting diabetes. Being 40% overweight makes people 30%-50% more likely to die of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. Extreme fatness makes patients so much less likely to survive surgery that many doctors refuse to operate until they slim. The idea that being overweight is caused by obesity genes is not wholly false: researchers have found a number of genes that appear to make some people bum off energy at a slower rate. But genes are not destiny. The difference between someone with a genetic predisposition to gain weight and someone without appears to be roughly 40 calories—or a spoonful of mayonnaise—a day. An alternative fatlash argument, advanced in books such as Dean Onrush's Eat More, Weight Less (Harper Collies, 1993) and Date Atrens's Don't Diet (William Morrow, 1978), is that fatness is not a matter of eating too much. They note that as Americans' weight has ballooned over the last few decades, their reported caloric intake has plunged. This simply explains people's own recollection of how much they eat is extremely unreliable. And as they grow fatter, people feel guilty and are more likely to fib about how much they eat. All reputable studies show that eating less and exercising reduce weight. Certainly, the body's metabolism slows a little when you lose weight, because it takes less energy to carry less bulk around, and because dieting can make the body fear it is about to starve. But a sensible low-fat diet makes weight loss possible. The fatlash movement is dangerous, because slimmers will often find any excuse to give up. To tell people that it is healthy to be obese is to encourage them to live sick and die young.