单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Women, according to Chairman Mao, hold up half the sky—but {{U}}in California some are better rewarded for this effort than others.{{/U}} According to a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California, Asian women born in the United States outstrip all their sisters in terms of earning power. The average hourly wage for American-born Asian ladies in 2001 (the latest year with reliable figures) was $19.30, with American-born whites coming next. On the bottom rungs of the ladder came Latinas: if born abroad, they earned a mere $10.40 an hour (though this was comfortably above California's then $6.25 minimum wage); if born in America, they managed $15.10 an hour. Education is the biggest reason for the ethnic disparities. Some 55% of California's American-born Asian women have at least a bachelor's degree, and an impressive 84% of them either have jobs or are looking for them. By contrast, only 14% of American-born Hispanic women have a bachelor's degree and only 74% of them are in the labour market. Meanwhile, Latinas born abroad are often condemned to low-paying jobs by an even inefficient education or a poor knowledge of English. Much the same can be said of Asian women born in South-East Asia, a category that includes refugees from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The institute calculates that they earned an average of $15.80, almost $1 less than other foreign-born Asians. But education is not the only factor in play for California's women. Larger families make it more difficult for Latinas to go out to work in the first place; blacks often live too far away to commute to well-paid jobs; and just as Asians may benefit from high expectations, so other groups may suffer from low ones. The institute makes an attempt, heroic or politically correct, to adjust for such factors, imagining, for example, that a foreign-born Latina has the same family structure, education and place of residence as the average Californian woman. That brings the average wage for foreign-born Latinas up to a more respectable $15.20; yet American-born Asians still {{U}}rule the roost{{/U}}. But before the golden girls get too happy, the institute reckons that Californian women of all sorts tend to earn roughly 20% less than their menfolk do.

单选题Millions of dollars often depend on the choice of which commercial to use in launching a new product. So you show the commercials to a 1 of typical consumers and ask their opinion. The answers you get can sometimes lead you into a big 2 . Respondents may lie just to be polite. Now some companies and major advertising 3 have been hiring voice detectives who test your normal voice and then record you on tape 4 commenting on a product. A computer analyzes the degree and direction of change 5 normal. One kind of divergence of pitch means the subject 6 . Another kind means he was really enthusiastic. In a testing of two commercials 7 children, they were, vocally, about equally 8 of both, but the computer reported their emotional 9 in the two was totally different. Most major commercials are sent for testing to theaters 10 with various electronic measuring devices. People regarded as 11 are brought in off the street. Viewers can push buttons to 12 whether they are interested or bored. Newspaper and magazine groups became intensely interested in testing their ads for a product 13 TV ads for the same product. They were interested because the main 14 of evidence shows that people 15 a lot more mental activity when they read 16 when they sit in front of the TV set. TV began to be 17 "a low-involvement" 18 . It is contended that low involvement means that there is less 19 that the ad message will be 20 .

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Yasuhisa Shizoki, a 51-year-old MP from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), starts tapping his finger on the dismal economic chart on his coffee table. "Unless we change the decision-making process," he says bluntly, "we are not going to be able to solve this kind of problem." With the economy in such a mess, it may seem a bit of a diversion to be trying to sort out Japan's political structures as well as its economic problems. But Mr Shiozaki can hardly be accused of time-wasting. He has consistently prodded the government to take a firm hand to ailing banks, and has given warning against complacency after a recent rise in share prices. Far from being a distraction, his latest cause highlights how far Japan is from genuine economic reform. Since cowriting a report on political reform, which was released by an LDP panel last week, Mr Shiozaki has further upset the party's old guard. Its legionaries, flanked by columns of the bureaucracy, continue to hamper most attempts to overhaul the economy. Junichiro Koizumi was supposed to change all that, by going over their heads and appealing directly to the public. Yet nearly a year after becoming prime minister, Mr Koizumi has precious little to show for his efforts. His popularity is now flagging and his determination is increasingly in doubt. As hopes of immediate economic reform fade, optimists are focusing on another potential benefit of Mr Koizumi's tenure. They hope that his highly personalized style of leadership will pave the way for a permanent change in Japanese politics, towards more united and authoritative cabinets that are held directly accountable for their policies. As that happens, the thinking goes, real economic reforms will be able to follow. A leading candidate for change is the 40-year-old system--informal but religiously followed--through which the LDP machinery vets every bill before it ever gets to parliament. Most legislation starts in the LDP's party committees, which mirror the parliamentary committee structure. Proposals then go through two higher LDP bodies, which hammer out political deals to smooth their passage. Only then does the prime minister's cabinet get fully involved in approving the policy. Most issues have been decided by the LDP mandarins long before they reach this point, let alone the floor of parliament, leaving even the prime minister limited influence, and allowing precious little room for public debate and even less for accountability. As a result, progress will probably remain slow. Since they know that political reform leads to economic reform, and hence poses a threat to their interests, most of the LDP will resist any real changes. But at least a handful of insiders have now bought into one of Mr Koizumi's best slogans. "Change the LDP, change Japan."

单选题The main point of the text is that______.

单选题Google already has a window into our souls through our Internet searches and it now has insight into our ailing bodies too. The Internet giant is using its vast database of individual search terms to (1) the emergence of flu up to two weeks (2) government epidemiologists. Google Flu Trends uses the (3) of people to seek online help for their health problems. By tracking (4) for terms such as "cough", "fever" and "aches and pains", it claims to be able to (5) estimate where flu is (6) . Google tested the idea in nine regions of the US and found it could accurately predict flu (7) between 7 and 14 days earlier than the federal centres for disease control and prevention. Google hopes the idea could also be used to help (8) other diseases. Flu Trends is limited (9) the US. Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebb. Two software engineers (10) in the project, said that (11) in Google search queries can be very (12) . In a blog post on the project they wrote: "It turns (13) that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1 to 2 weeks to collect and (14) surveillance data but Google search queries can be (15) counted very quickly. By making our estimates (16) each day, Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza." They explained that (17) information health would be kept (18) . "Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users (19) we rely on anonymised, aggregated counts of how of ten certain search queries (20) each week./

单选题The videos created by Dough Aitken is used to show a combination of

单选题Compared with those in small.towns, people in large cities have______

单选题Employees like on-line conversation during the business because

单选题Concerning literary realism as mentioned in the passage, which of the following would the author be most likely to agree with?

单选题On a weekday night this January, thousands of flag-waving youths packed Olaya Street, Riyadh's main shopping strip, to cheer a memorable Saudi victory in the GCC Cup football final. One car, rock music blaring from its stereo, squealed to a stop, blocking an intersection. The passengers leapt out, clambered on to the roof and danced wildly in front of the honking crowd. Having paralyzed the traffic across half the city, they sped off before the police could catch them. Such public occasion was once unthinkable in the rigid conformist kingdom, but now young people there and in other Gulf states are increasingly willing to challenge authority. That does not make them rebels: respect for elders, for religious duty and for maintaining family bonds remain pre-eminent values, and premarital sex is generally out of the question. Yet demography is beginning to put pressure on ultra-conservative norms. After all, 60% of the Gulf's native population is under the age of 25. With many more of its citizens in school than in the workforce, the region faces at least a generation of rocketing demand for employment. In every single GCC country the native workforce will double by 2020. In Saudi Arabia it will grow from 3.3m now to over 8m. The task of managing this surge would be daunting enough for any society, but is particularly forbidding in this region, for several reasons. The first is that the Gulf suffers from a lopsided labor structure. This goes back to the 1970s, when ballooning oil incomes allowed governments to import millions of foreign workers and to dispense cozy jobs to the locals. The result is a two-tier workforce, with outsiders working mostly in the private sector and natives monopolizing the state bureaucracy. Private firms are as productive as any. But within the government, claims one study, workers are worth only a quarter of what they get paid. Similarly, in the education sector, 30 years spent keeping pace with soaring student numbers has taken a heavy toll on standards. The Saudi school system, for instance, today has to cope with 5m students, eight times more than in 1970. And many Gulf countries adapted their curricula from Egyptian models that are now thoroughly discredited. They continue to favor rote learning of "facts" intended to instill patriotism or religious values. Even worse, the system as a whole discourages intellectual curiosity. It channels students into acquiring prestige degrees rather than gaining marketable skills. Of the 120, 000 graduates that Saudi universities produced between 1995 and 1999, only 10,000 had studied technical subjects such as architecture or engineering. They accounted for only 2% of the total number of Saudis entering the job market.

单选题Up until a few decades ago, our visions of the future were largely—though by no means uniformly—glowingly positive. Science and technology would cure all the ills of humanity, leading to lives of fulfillment and opportunity for all. Now utopia has grown unfashionable, as we have gained a deeper appreciation of the range of threats facing us, from asteroid strike to epidemic flu to climate change. You might even be tempted to assume that humanity has little future to look forward to. But such gloominess is misplaced. The fossil record shows that many species have endured for millions of years—so why shouldn"t we? Take a broader look at our species" place in the universe, and it becomes clear that we have an excellent chance of surviving for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. Look up Homo sapiens in the "Red List" of threatened species of the International Union for the Conversation of Nature (IUCN) and you will read: "Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline." So what does our deep future hold? A growing number of researchers and organizations are now thinking seriously about that question. For example, the Long Now Foundation has its flagship project a mechanical clock that is designed to still be marking time thousands of years hence. Perhaps willfully, it may be easier to think about such lengthy timescales than about the more immediate future. The potential evolution of today"s technology, and its social consequences, is dazzlingly complicated, and it"s perhaps best left to science fiction writers and futurologists to explore the many possibilities we can envisage. That"s one reason why we have launched Arc, a new publication dedicated to the near future. But take a longer view and there is a surprising amount that we can say with considerable assurance. As so often, the past holds the key to the future: we have now identified enough of the long-term patterns shaping the history of the planet, and our species, to make evidence-based forecasts about the situations in which our descendants will find themselves. This long perspective makes the pessimistic view of our prospects seem more likely to be a passing fad. To be sure, the future is not all rosy. But we are now knowledgeable enough to reduce many of the risks that threatened the existence of earlier humans, and to improve the lot of those to come.

单选题What does the word "think-tanks" (Line 5, Paragraph 2) mean?

单选题Many professions are associated with a particular stereotype. The classic (1) of a writer, for example, is (2) a slightly crazy-looking person, (3) in an attic, writing away furiously for days (4) end. Naturally, he has his favorite pen and note-paper, or a beat-up typewriter, (5) which he could not produce a readable word. Nowadays, we know that such images bear little (6) to reality. But are they completely (7) ? In the case of at least one writer, it would seem not. Dame Muriel Spark, who (8) 80 in February, in many ways resembles this stereotypical "writer". She is certainly not (9) , and she doesn't work in an attic. But she is rather particular (10) the tools of her trade. She insists on writing with a (11) type of pen in a certain type of notebook, which she buys from a certain stationer in Edinburgh called James Thin. In fact, so (12) is she that, if someone uses one of her pens by (13) , she immediately throws it away. And she claims she (14) enormous difficulty writing in any notebook other than (15) sold by James Thin. This could soon be a (16) , as the shop no longer stocks them, (17) Dame Muriel's supply of 72-page spiral bound is nearly (18) . As well as her "obsession" about writing materials, Muriel Spark (19) one other characteristic with the stereotypical "writer": her work is the most (20) thing in her life. It has stopped her from marrying; cost her old friends and made her new ones, and driven her from London to New York to Rome. Today she lives in the Italian province of Tuscany with a friend.

单选题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 earthworm" : 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 free-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 modern 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{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Could HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, be weakening? The results of a study conducted in Belgium, at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, seem to suggest that in one corner of the world it might be. The report, published in the latest issue of AIDS, a specialist journal, concludes that HIV's ability to replicate (known technically as its virulence) may have decreased since the start of the pandemic. Kevin Aden, the lead author of the paper, stresses that the study is based on a small set of samples and does not prove that HIV's virulence is attenuating around the world. However, it does offer new insights into the evolution of the disease. Dr. Arien looked at 24 blood samples collected from untreated patients attending an HIV/ AIDS clinic in Antwerp. A dozen of these samples were taken between 1986 and 1989; the other 12 were collected between 2002 and 2003. First, he analyzed the samples to find their viral load (the number of virus particles per cubic centimeter) and the subtype of virus involved. In Europe and North America, the predominant subtype is B; in sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic is at its worst, the predominant subtype is C. Most of Dr. Arien's samples were of subtype B. Having done this analysis, he paired the samples off for a series of replicative "duels". Each sample from the earlier series was matched with the most similar one from the later series, and they were placed in identical cell cultures to see which would multiply the most. The result was that 75% of the viruses from 2002-03 were less virulent than apparently similar counterparts from 1986-89 -- a statistically significant observation. Dr. Arien's caution is sensible, at least until someone replicates the work elsewhere. But his conclusion is not necessarily surprising. Such viral attenuation, as it is known, is one way that vaccines are produced. What causes attenuation in wild viruses, though, is a matter of speculation. Dr Arien believes that in this case the attenuation could be the result of what he calls "serial genetic bottlenecks" during transmission from host to host. These act to reduce the genetic diversity (and thus the replicative fitness) of the virus. Genetic diversity is known to be an important component of HIV's virulence. But what might cause the bottlenecks is still unclear. A second reason for caution besides the small size of the study is, as Geoffrey Garnett, a professor of microparasite epidemiology at Imperial College, London, points out, that the ability of a virus to infect cells in a test-tube is not the same as its ability to cause disease and death in a human host. Nevertheless, Dr Aden's result is intriguing, and surely worth following up in a larger piece of research.

单选题It can be safely concluded from the text that smaller members of the Euro area would become more

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most right-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa. And the same competitive advantage is enjoyed by left-handers in other sports, such as tennis and cricket. The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialization of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans ( and all other vertebrate animals ) underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180~ relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain (and thus the right body) is usually dominant. And on average, lefthanders are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond, of the University of Montpellier Ⅱ , in France, think they know the answer. As they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, there is a clue in the advantage seen in boxing. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is true, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond set out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modem societies often involves the use of technology, notably firearms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond decided to confine their investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence ( by number of homicides) in traditional societies. By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, the two researchers found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1 000 inhabitants per year (compared with, for example, 0.068 in New York). And, according to Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0. 013 murders per 1 000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed. While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister".