单选题The author's attitude towards Dr. Farid's work is that of______.

单选题It can be concluded from the text that______.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points) Even the Saudis--or rather, the small number of men who actually rule their troubled country--are giving ground in the struggle for women's rights. For sure, the recommendations{{U}} (1) {{/U}}this week to Crown Prince Abdullah at the end of an{{U}} (2) {{/U}}round of "national dialogue" concentrating on the role of women were fairly tame. in the reformers-versus-reactionaries{{U}} (3) {{/U}}test of whether women should, be allowed to drive cars (at present they cannot do so in the kingdom, nor can they travel unaccompanied, by whatever{{U}} (4) {{/U}}of motion), the king was merely asked to"{{U}} (5) {{/U}}a body to study a public-transport system for women to facilitate mobility".{{U}} (6) {{/U}}mention, of course, of the right to vote--but then that has been{{U}} (7) {{/U}}to men too, though local elections, on an apparently universal franchise, are supposed to be held in October. In sum, it is a tortoise's progress. But the very fact of the debate happening at all is{{U}} (8) {{/U}}--and hopeful. It is not just in Saudi Arabia that more rights for women are being demanded{{U}} (9) {{/U}}across the whole of the Arab and Muslim world. The pushy Americans have made women's rights part of their appeal for greater democracy in{{U}} (10) {{/U}}they now officially call the "broader Middle East", to include non-Arab Muslim countries such as Iran, Turkey and even Afghanistan. Many Arabs have cautioned the Americans against seeking to{{U}} (11) {{/U}}their own values on societies with such different traditions and{{U}} (12) {{/U}}. Many leading Muslims have{{U}} (13) {{/U}}the culturally imperious Americans of seeking to{{U}} (14) {{/U}}Islam. The{{U}} (15) {{/U}}for more democracy in the Muslim world issued by leaders of the eight biggest industrial countries was watered down for fear of giving{{U}} (16) {{/U}}. Yet, despite the Arabs' prickliness, the Americans have helped pep up a debate that is now bubbling fiercely in the Arab world, even{{U}} (17) {{/U}}many Arab leaders, none of whom is directly elected by the people, are understandably{{U}} (18) {{/U}}of reforms that could lead to their own toppling. Never before have women's rights in the Arab world been so{{U}} (19) {{/U}}debated. That{{U}} (20) {{/U}}is cause to rejoice.

单选题Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research showing that senior women professors in the institute"s school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up elsewhere. One study—conducted in Sweden, of all places—showed that female medical-research scientists had to be twice as good as men to win research grants. These pieces of work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British universities. Sara Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia"s school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey of over 7,000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year"s meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is around ￡ 1,500 ($2,850) a year. That is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men"s and women"s lives mean the gap is caused by something else; women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr. Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of the hierarchy. Male professors, for example, earn over ￡ 4,000 a year more than female ones. To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr. Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantial 23% gap in pay, which Dr. Connolly attributes to discrimination. Besides pay, her study also looked at the " glass-ceiling" effect—namely that at all stages of a woman"s career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman to settle into a professorial chair. Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr. Connolly"s compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts, than do their sisters in industry or research institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words, delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia does.

单选题According to the second paragraph, which statement is TRUE?

单选题Which of the following most accurately describe the pattern of the text?

单选题What does the author think of unilateralism?

单选题In 1575--over 400 years ago the French scholar Louis Le Roy published a learned book in which he voiced despair over the changes caused by the social and technological innovations of his time, what we now call the Renaissance. We, also, feel that our times are out of joint; we even have reason to believe that our descendants will be worse off than we are. The earth will soon be overcrowded and its resources exhausted. Pollution will ruin the environment, upset the climate and endanger human health. The gap in living standards between the rich and the poor will widen and lead the angry, hungry people of the world to acts of desperation including the use of nuclear weapons as blackmail. Such are the inevitable consequences of population and technological growth if present trends continue. The future is never a projection of the past. Animals probably have no chance to escape from the tyranny of biological evolution, but human beings are blessed with the freedom of social evolution. For us, trend is not destiny (fate). The escape from existing trends is now facilitated by the fact that societies anticipate future dangers and take preventive steps against expected changes. Despite the widespread belief that the world has become too complex for comprehension by the human brain, modern societies have often responded effectively to critical situations. The decrease in birth rates, the partial prohibition of pesticides and the rethinking of technologies for the production and use of energy are but a few examples illustrating a sudden reversal of trends caused not by political upsets or scientific breakthroughs, but by public awareness of consequences. Even more striking are the situations in which social attitudes concerning future difficulties undergo rapid changes before the problems have come to pass -- witness the heated arguments about the problems of behavior control and of genetic engineering even though there is as yet no proof that effective methods can be developed to manipulate behavior and genes on a population scale. One of the characteristics of our times is thus the rapidity with which steps can be taken to change the orientation of certain trends and even to reverse them. Such changes usually emerge from grass root movements rather than from official directives.

单选题The purpose of the website is to

单选题Which of the following can be a disadvantage of U.S. "Big Steel" as pointed out in the text?

单选题What can be inferred from the words of Dave Forney?

单选题Income inequality in the United State remained relatively stable for a period of nearly forty years. Beginning in the 1970's, however, this period of stability ended, as the first signs of widening income inequality became apparent. Over the course of the 1970's and 1980's , an increasingly clear trend toward greater income inequality emerged. By the end of the 1980's, the top 20 percent of workers were receiving the largest share of income ever recorded by government figures, and the bottom three fifths were receiving the lowest shares ever recorded. This trend has continued into the 1990's and currently shows no signs of decline. When the indicators of growing inequality were first observed in the 1970's, some researchers argued that the effects were merely temporary artifacts of short-term labor market disturbances. The new occupational structure appears to be one with an increase of well-paid technical, scientific and professional jobs at the top, a sliding middle class, and a growing poorly-paid service and retail jobs at the bottom. Several important labor-force changes appeared to be contributing to the shifting occupational structure. As occupational reconstructing and growing income inequality have become increasingly evident, a heated debate as to the causes and magnitude of these changes arose. Two dominant bodies of thought emerged around the issue: the job-skill mismatch thesis and the polarization thesis. Mismatch theorists argue that there is an increasing distance between the high skill requirements of post-industrial jobs and the inadequate training and mediocre qualifications of workers. They see the post-industrial economy leaving behind unskilled workers, especially women and minorities. For the mismatch theorist, the trend toward greater inequality is temporary arid will dissipate once the supply of workers acquires the skills demanded by a post-industrial economy. And they predict that the workers will experience an upgrading in their wages over the long run. Polarization theorists, on the other hand, believe that the rise in inequality is permanent, a result of the shift to a service-based economy. This vision of the postindustrial economy is characteristically polarized. The problem according to these theorists, is the type of jobs being generated in the new economy, not worker attributes. Because they believe the causes are structural and permanent, polarization theorists would deny the efficacy of public policies designed to educate and train unskilled workers. They predict a long-term continuation of the trend towards increasing income inequality. Studies show that the long-run increase in income inequality is also related to changes in the Nation's labor market and its household composition. The wage distribution has become considerably more unequal with more highly skilled, trained and educated workers at the top experiencing real wage gains and those at the bottom real wage losses. One factor is the shift in employment from those goods-producing industries that have disproportionately provided high-wage opportunities for low-skilled workers, towards services that disproportionately employ college graduates, and towards low-wage sectors such as retail trade. But within industry, shifts in labor demand away from less-educated workers are perhaps a more important explanation of eroding wages than the shift out of manufacturing. Also cited as putting downward pressure on the wages of less-educated workers are intensifying global competition and immigration, the decline of the proportion of workers belonging to unions, the decline in the real value of the minimum wage, the increasing need for computer skills, and the increasing use of temporary workers.

单选题 The United States has historically had higher rates of marriage than those of other industrialized countries. The current annual marriage{{U}} (1) {{/U}}in the United States-about 9 new marriages for every 1, 000 people-is{{U}} (2) {{/U}}higher than it is in other industrialized countries. However, marriage is{{U}} (3) {{/U}}as widespread as it was several decades ago.{{U}} (4) {{/U}}of American adults who are married{{U}} (5) {{/U}}from 72 percent in 1970 to 60 percent in 2002. This does not mean that large numbers of people will remain unmarried{{U}} (6) {{/U}}their lives. Throughout the 20th century, about 90 percent of Americans married at some{{U}} (7) {{/U}}in their lives. Experts{{U}} (8) {{/U}}that about the same proportion of today's young adults will eventually marry. The timing of marriage has varied{{U}} (9) {{/U}}over the past century. In 1995 the average age of women in the United States at the{{U}} (10) {{/U}}of their first marriage was 25. The average age of men was about 27. Men and women in the United States marry{{U}} (11) {{/U}}the first time at an average of five years later than people{{U}} (12) {{/U}}in the 1950s.{{U}} (13) {{/U}}, young adults of the 1950s married younger than did any previous{{U}} (14) {{/U}}in U. S. history. Today's later age of marriage is{{U}} (15) {{/U}}the age of marriage between 1890 and 1940.{{U}} (16) {{/U}}, a greater proportion of the population was married (95 percent) during the 1950s than at any time before{{U}} (17) {{/U}}. Experts do not agree on{{U}} (18) {{/U}}the "marriage rush" of the late 1940s and 1950s occurred, but most social scientists believe it represented a{{U}} (19) {{/U}}to the return of peaceful life and prosperity after 15 years of severe economic{{U}} (20) {{/U}}and war.

单选题Analysts have their go at humor, and I have read some of this interpretative literature, (1) without being greatly instructed. Humor can be (2) , (3) a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are (4) to any but the pure scientific mind. One of the things (5) said about humorists is that they are really very sad people-clowns with a breaking heart. There is some truth in it, but it is badly (6) . It would be more (7) , I think, to say that there is a deep vein of melancholy running through everyone's life and that the humorist, perhaps more (8) of it than some others, compensates for it actively and (9) . Humorists fatten on troubles. They have always made trouble (10) . They struggle along with a good will and endure pain (11) , knowing how well it will (12) them in the sweet by and by. You find them wrestling with foreign languages, fighting folding ironing boards and swollen drainpipes, suffering the terrible (13) of tight boots. They pour out their sorrows profitably, in a (14) of what is not quite fiction nor quite fact either. Beneath the sparking surface of these dilemmas flows the strong (15) of human woe. Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don't have to be a humorist to (16) the sadness of situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point (17) his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is (18) humor, like poetry, has an extra content, it plays (19) to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the (20) .

单选题One of the most important social developments that helped to make possible a shift in thinking about the r01e of public education was the effect of the baby boom of the 1950s and 1960s on the schools. In the 1920s, but especially in the Depression conditions of the 1930s, the United States experienced a declining birth rate—every thousand women aged fifteen to forty-four gave birth to about 118 live children in 1920, 89.2 in 1930, 75.8 in 1936, and 80 in 1940. With the growing prosperity brought on by the Second World War and the economic boom that followed it, young people married and established households earlier and began to raise larger families than had their predecessors during the Depression. Birth rates rose to 102 per thousand in 1946, 106.2 in 1950, and 118 in 1955. Although economics was probably the most important determinant, it is not the only explanation for the baby boom. The increased value placed on the idea of the family also helps to explain this rise in birth rates. The baby boomers began streaming into the first grade by the mid-1940s and became a flood by 1950. The public school system suddenly found itself overtaxed. While the number of schoolchildren rose because of wartime and postwar conditions, these same conditions made the schools even less prepared to cope with the flood. The wartime economy meant that few new schools were built between 1940 and 1945. Moreover, during the war and in the boom times that followed, large numbers of teachers left their profession for better-paying jobs elsewhere in the economy. Therefore, in the 1950s and 1960s, the baby boom hit an antiquated and inadequate school system. Consequently, the " custodial rhetoric " of the 1930s and early 1940s no longer made sense; that is, keeping youths aged sixteen and older out of the labor market by keeping them in school could no longer be a high priority for an institution unable to find space and staff to teach younger children aged five to sixteen. With the baby boom, the focus of educators and of laymen interested in education inevitably turned toward the lower grades and back to basic academic skills and discipline. The system no longer had much interest in offering nontraditional, new, and extra services to older youth.