单选题Clouds may have silver linings, but even the sunniest of us seldom glimpse them on foot. The marvelous Blur Building that hovers above the lake of Yverdon les Bains in Switzerland provides such an opportunity. It gives anyone who has ever wanted to step into the clouds they watch from the airplane window a chance to realize their dream. Visitors wear waterproof ponchos before setting off along a walkway above the lake that takes them into the foggy atmosphere of the cloud. The experience of physical forms blurring before your eyes as you enter the cloud is both disorientating and liberating. However firmly your feet are planted on the floor, it is hard to escape the sensation of floating. On the upper deck of this spaceship-shaped structure, the Angel Bar, a translucent counter lit in tones of aqueous blue, beckons with a dozen different kinds of mineral water. To enter this sublime building situated in the landscape of the Swiss Alps feels like walking into a poem—it is part of nature but removed from reality, Its architects, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio of New York, designed it as a pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 in the Three Lakes region of Switzerland, an hour's train ride from Geneva, which features a series of exhibits on the lakes. The Blur Building is easily the most successful. Indeed, you can skip the rest of the Expo—a Swiss kitsch version of Britain's Millennium Dome—and head straight for the cloud, which is there until the end of October. The architects asked themselves what was the ideal material for building on a lake and decided on water itself.' the element of the lake, the snow. the rivers and the mist above it. They wanted to play on and lay bare the notion of a world's fair pavilion by creating an ethereal ghost of one in which there is nothing to see. The result is a refuge from the surveillance cameras and high-definition images of our everyday world—a particular tease in Switzerland, where clarity and precision are so prized. (Anti- architecture or not, the Blur Building cost a cool $7.5 million.) Out-of-the-box thinking is a trademark of Diller+Scofidio. a husband-and-wife team of architecture professors who became the first architects to win a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1999. Although they have built very little, they are interested in the social experience of architecture, in challenging people's ideas about buildings. They treat architecture as an analytical art form that combines other disciplines, such as visual art and photography, dance and theatre. To realize its Utopian poetry, the Blur Building has to be technologically state-of-the-art. Water from the lake is pumped through 32.000 fog nozzles positioned throughout the skeleton-like stainless steel structure; so the building does not just look like a cloud on the outside, it feels like a cloud on the inside. And while the 300-foot-wide platform can accommodate up to 400 people, visitors vanish from each other in the mist at about five paces, so you really can wander lonely as a cloud. Wordsworth must be smiling.

单选题Historians have only recently begun to note the increase in demand for luxury goods and services that took place in eighteenth-century England. MeKendrick has explored the Wedgewood Firm's remarkable success in marketing luxury pottery. Plumb has written about the proliferation of provincial theaters, musical festivals and children' s toys and books. While the feat of this consumer revolution is hardly in doubt, three key questions remain : Who were the consumers? What were their motives? And what were the effects of the new demand for luxuries? An answer to the first of these has been difficult to obtain. Although it has been possible to infer from the goods and service actually produced what manufacturers and servicing trades thought their customers wanted, only a study of relevant personal documents written by actual consumers will provide a precise picture of who wanted what. We still need to know how large this consumer market was and how far down the social scale the consumer demand for luxury goods penetrated. With regard to this last question, we might note in passing that Thompson, while rightly restoring laboring people to the stage of eighteenth-century English history, has probably exaggerated the opposition of these people to the inroads of capitalist consumerism in general: for example, laboring people in eighteenth-century England readily shifted from home-brewed beer to standardized beer produced by huge, heavily capitalized urban breweries. To answer the question of why consumers became so eager to buy, some historians have pointed to the ability of manufacturers to advertise in a relatively uncensored press. This, however, hardly seems a sufficient answer. MeKendriek favors a Viable model of conspicuous consumption stimulated by competition for status. The " middling sort" bought goods and services because they wanted to follow fashions set by the rich. Again, we may wonder whether this explanation is sufficient. Do not people enjoy buying things as a form of self-gratification? If so, consumerism could be seen as a product of the rise of new concepts of individualism and materialism, but not necessarily of the frenzy for conspicuous competition. Finally, what were the consequences of this consumer demand for luxuries? MeKendriek claims that it goes a long way toward explaining the coming of the Industrial Revolution. But does it? What, for example, does the production of high-quality potteries and toys have to do with the development of iron manufacture or textile mills? I t is perfectly possiMe Go have the psychology and reality of consumer society without a heavy industrial sector. That future exploration of these key questions is undoubtedly necessary should not, however, diminish the force of the conclusion of recent studies: the insatiable demand in the tenth-century England for frivolous as well as useful goods and services foreshadows our own world.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Leave it to writer Buchwald to bring humor to hospice. Last February, the famed satirist was diagnosed with terminal kidney failure, given three weeks to live, and transferred to a hospice for a quiet goodbye. Then the unexpected happened. His kidneys almost miraculously started working again. The poisons in his blood that were supposed to carry him out in peaceful slumber(死亡) washed out of his system, leaving instead a funny bone stunned and amused by the absurdity of the situation. It's not every day that someone flunks hospice. Seasoned author that he is, Buchwald turned the irony into a book. Only 10 months ago, he was a sad, 80-year-old man with a newly amputated(切除) leg and kidneys on the fritz(发生故障). Despite his family's pleas, he entered a hospice facility, at ease with his Choice to die naturally. Most people don't know much about hospice, the place. It doesn't cure; it cares, relieving physical pain and mental anguish. Most often, cancer or cardiovascular(心血管病) disease carries hospice patients to their end, usually in weeks. But some are put on hold like Buchwald. Buchwald left after five months. In one large study, 6 percent of hospice patients improved enough to be taken off the terminal list and sent home. Buchwald was shocked when the big sleep didn't come. Before Buchwald became the hospice's superstar, he had been the poster boy for depression. But with the help of physicians and medication, he didn't drown. Laugh or cry. Facing natural death, he now offers a message many of his contemporaries need to hear. Older men, particularly those in their 80s, have the highest rate of suicide. Risk factors for them notably include health issues. In fact, suicide often comes soon after they've seen a doctor. On that point, Buchwald notes the medical dearth of smiles and laughter." Look at how often doctors and nurses walk into a patient's room all serious," he says. His prescription? They" need to go to Disney World to be trained." Laughter, of course, is the best medicine, and some studies even show humor is a biological stress reliever. As Buchwald sees it, many humorists use it as therapy to block out periods of hurt or anger. You would not know there were hurts or anger judging by his hospice time. Friends and family smothered Buchwald with love. VIPs beat a path to the hospice door. And they all came bearing food, lots of cheesecake. He thrived. After he planned his funeral, he started up writing again and found he could write wonderfully. Buchwald is now teaching all of us how to live--and to die. Yet he's quick to add," I have had such a good time at the hospice. I am going to miss it."

单选题By saying "no paradise is without its paradoxes" (Line 1. Paragraph 2), the author means

单选题What can be inferred from the last paragraph?

单选题In the next century we'll be able to alter our DNA radically, encoding our visions and vanities while concocting new life-forms. When Dr. Frankenstein made his monster, he wrestled with the moral issue of whether he should allow it to reproduce, "Had I the right, for my own benefit, to inflict the curse upon everlasting generations?" Will such questions require us to develop new moral philosophies? Probably not. Instead, we'll reach again for a time-tested moral concept, one sometimes called the Golden Rule and which Kant, the millennium's most prudent moralist, conjured up into a categorical imperative: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; treat each person as an individual rather than as a means to some end. Under this moral precept we should recoil at human cloning, because it inevitably entails using humans as means to other humans' ends and valuing them as copies of others we loved or as collections of body parts, not as individuals in their own right. We should also draw a line, however fuzzy, that would permit using genetic engineering to cure diseases and disabilities but not to change the personal attributes that make someone an individual (IQ, physical appearance, gender and sexuality). The biotech age will also give us more reason to guard our personal privacy. Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, got it wrong: rather than centralizing power in the hands of the state, DNA technology has empowered individuals and families. But the state will have an important role, making sure that no one, including insurance companies, can look at our genetic data without our permission or use it to discriminate against us. Then we can get ready for the breakthroughs that could come at the end of the next century and the technology is comparable to mapping our genes: plotting the 10 billion or more neurons of our brain. With that information we might someday be able to create artificial intelligences that think and experience consciousness in ways that are indistinguishable from a human brain. Eventually we might be able to replicate our own minds in a "dry-ware" machine, so that we could live on without the "wet-ware" of a biological brain and body. The 20th century's revolution in infotechnology will thereby merge with the 21st century's revolution in biotechnology. But this is science fiction. Let's turn the page now and get back to real science.

单选题According to the passage, CDC is an organization that

单选题One big obstacle to the development of travel medicine is________.

单选题Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the text as one of the factors that may influence brain shrinkage?

单选题By saying "a variant on the formula" (Line 1, Paragraph 4), the author means that

单选题The phrase "familiar sights" in the first sentence is nearest in meaning to ______.

单选题 To the people of the Bijagos archipelago, the shark is sacred. In{{U}} (1) {{/U}}ceremonies young men from these islands{{U}} (2) {{/U}}the coast of Guinea-Bissau must spear a shark and present the liver to their{{U}} (3) {{/U}}But can this ancient ceremony{{U}} (4) {{/U}}the economic fact that a bowl of shark's fin soup can cost $150 in the Far East? In the archipelago, and all along West Africa's coast, sharks are being "finned" to{{U}} (5) {{/U}}Fishermen can earn $50-80{{U}} (6) {{/U}}a kilo of sharks' fins. far more than ordinary fish. By the time they{{U}} (7) {{/U}}the Far East, they could be{{U}} (8) {{/U}}$500 a kilo or more. valuable{{U}} (9) {{/U}}aphrodisiacs as well as for gourmets. The high demand is{{U}} (10) {{/U}}shark populations in West Africa and elsewhere. Most fish, .vulnerable to{{U}} (11) {{/U}}eaten by bigger fish, protect their species by laying millions of eggs. But the shark has no natural enemy{{U}} (12) {{/U}}man. and gives birth to just a{{U}} (13) {{/U}}of young.{{U}} (14) {{/U}}female sharks are often caught{{U}} (15) {{/U}}pregnant, the result has been predictably disastrous. Shark-like sawfish, which are also "finned". are already virtually{{U}} (16) {{/U}}off the Bijagos islands, and guitarfish are{{U}} (17) {{/U}}threat. In some parts of West Africa, when sharks and other similar fish have been finned, the rest of the flesh is often{{U}} (18) {{/U}}, salted and exported to places like Ghana, where there is a{{U}} (19) {{/U}}for lt. Dried shark is used much{{U}} (20) {{/U}}a stock cube would be elsewhere. But in the Bijagos islands, where traders are uninterested in exporting dried shark, carcasses are often left to rot on the beach.