单选题On April 20, 2000, in Accra, Ghana, the leaders of six West African countries declared their intention to proceed to monetary union among the non-CFA franc countries of the region by January 2003, as first step toward a wider monetary union including all the ECOWAS countries in 2004. The six countries 1 themselves to reducing central bank financing of budget deficits 2 10 percent of the previous years government 3 ; reducing budget deficits to 4 percent of the second phase by 2003; creating a Convergence Council to help 4 macroeconomic policies; and 5 up a common central bank. Their declaration 6 that, "Member States 7 the need 8 strong political commitment and 9 to 10 all such national policies 11 would facilitate the regional monetary integration process." The goal of a monetary union in ECOWAS has long been an objective of the organization, going back to its formation in 1975, and is intended to 12 broader integration process that would include enhanced regional trade and 13 institutions. In the colonial period, currency boards linked sets of countries in the region. 14 independence, 15 , these currency boards were 16 , with the 17 of the CFA franc zone, which included the francophone countries of the region. Although there have been attempts to advance the agenda of ECOWAS monetary cooperation, political problems and other economic priorities in several of the region"s countries have to 18 inhibited progress. Although some problems remain, the recent initiative has been bolstered by the election in 1999 of a democratic government and a leader who is committed to regional 19 in Nigeria, the largest economy of the region, raising hopes that the long-delayed project can be 20 .

单选题What can be inferred from the words of Robson Walton and Lee Scott?

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The last-minute victory of the Texas Longhorns in this year's Rose Bowl--America's college football championship--was the kind of thing that stays with fans forever. Just as well, because many had paid vast sums to see the game. Rose Bowl tickets officially sold for＄175 each. On the internet, resellers were hawking them for as much as ＄ 3,000 a pop. "Nobody knows how to control [this]," observed Mitch Dorger, the tournament's chief executive. Re-selling tickets for a profit, known less politely as scalping in America or touting in Britain, is booming. In America alone, the "secondary market" for tickets to sought-after events is worth over ＄10 billion, reckons Jeffrey Fluhr, the boss of StubHub, an online ticket market. Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of "Tickets here, tickets here" still ring out before kick off. But the internet has created a larger and more efficient market. Some internet-based ticket agencies, such as tickco, com and dynamiteticketz, com act as traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them on for a substantial mark-up. But others like StubHub have a new business mode — bring together buyers and sellers, and then take a cut. For each transaction, StubHub takes a juicy 25%. Despite its substantial commission—far higher than those charged by other online intermediaries including eBay or Craigslist—StubHub is flourishing. The firm was set up in 2000 and this year's Rose Bowl was its biggest event ever. The Super Bowl in early February will bring another nice haul, as have U2 and Rolling Stones concerts. Unlike eBay, which is the largest online trader in tickets, StubHub guarantees each transaction, so buyers need not worry about fraud. The company's revenues, now around ＄ 200m, are tripling annually (despite its start in the dotcom bust). And there is plenty more room to grow. Mr. Fluhr notes that the market remains "highly fragmented", with tiny operations still flourishing and newspaper classifieds not yet dead. But there are risks. Some events are boosting prices to cut the resale margins; others are using special measures to crack down. This summer, tickets to the soccer World Cup in Germany will include the name and passport number of the original purchaser and embedded chips that match the buyer to the tickets. Then there are legal worries. In America, more than a dozen states have anti-scalping laws of various kinds. New Mexico forbids the reselling of tickets for college games; Mississippi does so for all events on government-owned property. Such laws are often ignored, but can still bite. In Massachusetts, where reselling a ticket for more than ＄ 2 above face value is unlawful, one fan brought a lawsuit last autumn against 16 companies (including StubHub) over his pricey Red Sox tickets.

单选题It can be inferred from the fifth paragraph that______.

单选题The word "doctored" ( Line 9, Paragraph 1 ) probably means

单选题The double meaning of the word "sinister" refers to

单选题It"s often been said that history is written by the winners. This was never more true than on March 12, when the Texas board of education voted 10-5 in favor of curriculum standards that would promote conservative takes on controversial issues in the pages of the state"s textbooks. The changes, expected to win final approval in May, include an increased emphasis on and sympathetic treatment of such Republican standards as the National Rifle Association and the Moral Majority. They also boast the advantage of capitalism and the role of Christianity in the nation"s founding. Even Thorn as Jefferson"s profile will be reduced; some board members were less than fond of his ideas about the division of church and state. This is not Texas" first such skirmish. Since the 1970s, the state has tried to drop books that were seen as too liberal or anti-Christian, to omit passages on the gay-rights movement and to tone down global-warming arguments. But the nation"s battle over textbooks stretches back almost half a century earlier. In 1925, Tennessee"s Butler Act (which was abolished in 1967) made it illegal to teach "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible". The Scopes "monkey trial" famously followed. In 1974, a clash erupted in Kanawha County, West Virginia, over the controversial writings of such authors as George Orwell, Arthur Miller and Alien Ginsberg. Opposition was so heated that some schools were threatened with explosions. As one of America"s largest textbook buyers, the Longhorn State has a good deal of sway over what is sold to schools nationwide. And while Napoleon may have maintained that "history is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon", getting Texans to come together on the past may prove to be their Waterloo.

单选题That rapscallion who leaps off the monkey bars, landing smack onto an innocent 3-year-old bystander, and skips off, giggling all the while? According to a new paper out of Israel, he may not feel all that bad about the incident. The study, conducted by Dr. In bal Kivenson Bar-On at the University of Haifa, shows that high levels of fearlessness in 3-and 4-year-olds is strongly associated with aggression and a lack of sympathy. This news will likely surprise risk-loving America, where parents typically beam with pride when their undaunted child mounts the big slide. Fearlessness is a far-end point on the spectrum of what psychologists call the "approach and withdrawal dimension"—people's tendency to approach new stimuli (to gain information and acquire new skills ) and withdraw from unfamiliar stimuli (to avoid danger). Striking the right balance is considered crucial to man's survival. But what about preschoolers'? There's a clear downside, Dr. Kivenson Bar-On discovered, after she observed lots of preschool play and machinations. In total, she documented 80 children at preschool, home and in the lab, measuring their propensity for fearlessness and other social and emotional characteristics at the beginning and end of one year. Fearlessness was measured by observing reactions to various fright-inducing situations: separation from parents, the roar of a vacuum cleaner, a jack-in-the-box and the like. Those who displayed greater levels of fearlessness, the study found, had no trouble recognizing facial expressions of anger, surprise, happiness and sadness in other children—but they had a hard time identifying fear. Over all, they were "emotionally shallow" and showed lower levels of sympathy. They took advantage of friends and lacked regret over inappropriate conduct. "These findings," the paper explains, " suggest that fearlessness in preschool constitutes a clear risk factor for developmental pathways that lead to problems in morality, conscience development, and severe antisocial behaviors. " At the same time, fearless children tended to be highly sociable. "One of the most interesting findings was that we could discriminate between friendliness and sympathy," Dr. Kivenson Bar-On said. "These kids are curious, easygoing and friendly, but they have a hard time recognizing emotional distress in others. " Jamie Ostrov, a psychology professor at the State University at Buffalo who studies aggression, says that children at the extreme end of the fearless spectrurn "may be charming, but they're also highly manipulative and deceptive and skilled at getting their way—even at age 3 or 4. " It could be that fearless children need stronger distress cues to active their autonomic nervous systems, limiting their ability to detect distress cues in others. It seems to be, if I'm not worried about this, you can't be, either. But should we be?

单选题The Amazon River basin boasts the largest river system on Earth and harbors an ecosystem that is tremendously complex. Early travelers from renaissance Europe were overwhelmed by their first encounters. In 1531, Francisco Pizarro overthrew the Incan empire, removing the emperor from his throne and taking for Spain the Incan imperial treasures. A decade later his younger brother ventured east from the high plateau of the Andes Mountains in pursuit of the famous cities of gold and spices thought to be hidden in the jungle forest. Going down the river the expedition soon exhausted its supplies and a small group was sent ahead to search for food. Eight months later, this group emerged at the mouth of the Amazon, having made what would prove to be the first descent of the length of the river. A missionary who accompanied the group sent a remarkable account of their adventures to the Pope, including mention of the great signal drums that sounded from village to village far in advance of their arrival, warning of the coming of the European strangers. His manuscript records seeing innumerable settlements along the river—on one day they passed more than twenty villages in succession, and some of these are said to have stretched for six miles or more. Such reports have intrigued scientists ever since, for they describe dense populations and large federations of tribes which, if verified, would be entirely at odds with modern stereotypes of hidden, thinly scattered tribes scratching out an uncertain existence. Beginning in the late seventeenth-century, the successors to the first explorers recorded and collected many of the everyday objects fashioned from wood and other organic materials that usually rot in a tropical climate. Such collections housed in European museums preserve a "window" into cultures that were soon to experience huge changes brought about by foreign diseases and cruel abuse at the hands of Europeans. Population collapse and movement along the principal rivers of the Amazon system have contributed to a veil of misunderstanding that has long covered the cultural achievements of tropical forest societies. Diffuse bands hunting deep in the forest interior eventually came to be seen as the typical tropical forest adaptation. So much so that when archaeological studies began in earnest at the mouth of the Amazon in the 1950's, scientists argued that the sophisticated culture they were discovering could not have originated in the Amazon Basin itself, but must have been derived from more advanced cultures elsewhere. They imagined the tropical forest to be an "imitation paradise" unable to support much beyond a simple hunting-and-gathering way of life. This mistaken idea has exerted a persistent influence ever since.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Someone has calculated that by the time an American reaches the age of 40, he or she has been exposed to one million ads. Another estimate is that we have encountered more than 600, 000 ads by the time we reach the age of only 18. Now, of course, we don't remember what exactly they said or even what the product was, but a composite message gets through: that you deserve the best, that you should have it now, and that it's okay to indulge yourself, because you deserve the compliments, sex appeal, or adventure you are going to get as a result of buying this car or those cigarettes. Our consumer-based economy makes two absolutely reciprocal psychological demands on its members. On the one hand, you need the "discipline" values to ensure that people will be good workers and lead orderly, law-abiding lives. On the other hand, you need the "enjoy yourself" messages to get people to be good consumers. One author was disturbed about the "enjoy yourself" side, but acknowledged that "without a means of stimulating mass consumption, the very structure of our business enterprise would collapse." The interesting question has to do with the psychological consequences of the discrepancy between the dual messages. The "discipline" or "traditional values" theme demands that one compartment of the personality have a will strong enough to keep the individual doing unpleasant work at low wages, or to stay in an unhappy marriage, and, in general, to do things for the good of the commonwealth. The "enjoy yourself" message, on the other hand, tends to encourage a very different kind of personality-one that is self-centered, based on impulse, and is unwilling to delay rewards. As an illustration, I can't. resist reciting one of my favorite ads of all time, an ad from a psychology magazine: "I love me. I'm just a good friend to myself. And I like to do what makes me feel good. I used to sit around, putting things off till tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll drink champagne, and buy a set of pearls, and pick up that new stereo. But now I live my dreams today, not tomorrow." So what happens to us as we take in these opposing messages, as we are, in fact, torn between the opposite personality types that our society seems to require of us? Tile result is anxiety, fear, and a mysterious dread. The fear of being sucked in and dragged down by our consumer culture is real: the credit card company is not friendly when you default on your bills. And we all know that the path of pleasure-seeking and blind acquisition is a recipe for financial ruin-for most of us, anyway-and that, in American society, there isn't much of a safety net to catch you if you fall.

单选题The predominant idea of today is that

单选题For the first time in history more people live in towns than in the country. In Britain this has had a curious result. While polls show Britons rate "the countryside" alongside the royal family, Shakespeare and the National Health Service (NHS) as what makes them proudest of their country, this has limited political support. A century ago Octavia Hill launched the National Trust not to rescue stylish houses but to save "the beauty of natural places for everyone forever." It was specifically to provide city dwellers with spaces for leisure where they could experience "a refreshing air." Hill"s pressure later led to the creation of national parks and green belts. They don"t make countryside any more, and every year concrete consumes more of it. It needs constant guardianship. At the next election none of the big parties seem likely to endorse this sentiment. The Conservatives" planning reform explicitly gives rural development priority over conservation, even authorising "off-plan" building where local people might object. The concept of sustainable development has been defined as prof itable. Labour likewise wants to discontinue local planning where councils oppose development. The Liberal Democrats are silent. Only Ukip, sensing its chance, has sided with those pleading for a more considered ap proach to using green land. Its Campaign to Protect Rural England struck terror into many local Conservative parties. The sensible place to build new houses, factories and offices is where people are, in cities and towns where infrastructure is in place. The London agents Stirling Ackroyd recently identified enough sites for half a million houses in the London area alone, with no intrusion on green belt. What is true of London is even truer of the provinces. The idea that "housing crisis" equals "concreted meadows" is pure lobby talk. The issue is not the need for more house but, as always, where to put them. Under lobby pressure, George Osborne favours rural new-build against urban renovation and renewal. He favours out-of-town shopping sites against high streets. This is not a free market but a biased one. Rural towns and villages have grown and will always grow. They do so best where building sticks to their edges and respects their character. We do not ruin urban conservation areas. Why ruin rural ones? Development should be planned, not let rip. After the Netherlands, Britain is Europe"s most crowded country. Half a century of town and country planning has enabled it to retain an enviable rural coherence, while still permitting low-density urban living. There is no doubt of the alternative—the corrupted landscapes of southern Portugal, Spain or Ireland. Avoiding this rather than promoting it should unite the left and right of the political spectrum.