单选题The author of this article is

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Reading the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} After Los Angeles, Atlanta may be America's most car-dependent city. Atlantans sentimentally give their cars names, compare speeding tickets and jealously guard any side-street where it is possible to park. The city's roads are so well worn that the first act of the new mayor, Shirley Franklin, was to start repairing potholes. In 1998, 13 metro counties lost federal highway funds because their air-pollution levels violated the Clean Air Act. The American Highway Users Alliance ranked three Atlanta interchanges among the 18 worst {{U}}bottlenecks{{/U}} in the country. Other cities in the same fix have reorganized their highways, imposed commuter and car taxes, or expanded their public-transport systems. Atlanta does not like any of these things. Public transport is a vexed subject, too. Atlanta's metropolitan region is divided into numerous county and smaller city governments, which find it hard to work together. Railways now serve the city center and the airport, but not much else; bus stops are often near-invisible poles, offering no indication of which bus might stop there, or when. Georgia's Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, who hopes for reelection in November, has other plans. To win back the federal highway money lost under the Clean Air Act, he created the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), a 15 member board with the power to make the county governments, the city and the ten-county Atlanta Regional Commission cooperate on transport plans, whether they like it or not. Now GRTA has issued its own preliminary plan, allocating ＄ 4.5 billion over the next three years for a variety of schemes. The plan earmarks money to widen roads; to have an electric shuttle bus shuttle tourists among the elegant villas of Buckhead; and to create a commuter rail link between Atlanta and Macon, two hours to the south. Counties will be encouraged, with generous ten-to-one matching funds, to start express bus services. Public goodwill, however, may not stretch as far as the next plan, which is to build the Northern Arc highway for 65 miles across three counties north of the city limits. GRTA has allotted ＄270m for this. Supporters say it would ease the congestion on local roads; opponents think it would worsen over-development and traffic. The counties affected, and even GRTA's own board, are divided. The governor is in favor, however; and since he can appoint and fire GRTA'S members, that is probably the end of the story. Mr Barnes has a tendency to do as he wants, regardless. His arrogance on traffic matters could also lose him votes. But Mr Barnes think that Atlanta's slowing economy could do him more harm than the anti-sprawl movement.

单选题The basic problem of people pressure facing the Saudi authority lies in

单选题That Africa and South America were once joined can be deduced from the fact that ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Like every dog, every disease now seems to have its day. World Tuberculosis (infections disease in which growths appear on the lungs) Day is on Saturday March 24th. Tuberculosis was once terribly fashionable. Dying of "consumption" seems to have been a favorite activity of garret-dwelling 19th-century artists, h has, however, been neglected of late. Researchers in the field never tire of pointing out that TB kills a lot of people. According to figures released earlier this week by the World Health Organization, 1.6 million people died of the disease in 2005, compared with about 3m for AIDS and l m for malaria. But it receives only a fraction of the research budget devoted to AIDS. America's National Institutes of Health, for example, spends 20 times as much on AIDS as on TB. Nevertheless, everyone seems to getting in on the TB-day act this year. The Global Fund an international organization responsible fur fighting all three diseases but best known for its work on AIDS, has used the occasion to trumpet its tuberculosis projects. The fund claims that its anti-TB activities since it opened for business in 2002 have saved the lives of over 1m people. The World Health Organization has issued a report that contains some good news. Although the number of TB cases is still rising, the rate of illness seems to have stabilized; the caseload, in other words, is growing only because the population itself is going up. Even drug companies are involved. In the nm-up to the day itself, Eli Lilly announced a $ 50m boost to its MDRTB Global Partnership. MDR stands for multi-drug resistance, and it is one of the reasons why TB is back in the limelight. Careless treatment has caused drug-resistant strains to evolve all over the world. The course of drugs needed to clear the disease completely takes six mouths, anti persuading people lo stay that course once their symptoms have gone is hard. Unfortunately, those infected with MDR have to be treated with less effective, more poisonous and more costly drugs. Naturally, these provoke still more. non-compliance and thus still more evolution. The other reason TB is back is its relationship to AIDS. The (global Fund's joint responsibility for the diseases is no coincidence. AIDS does not kill directly. Rather, HIV, the virus that causes it, weakens the body's immune system and exposes the sufferer to secondary infections. Of these, TB is one of the most serious. It kills 200 000 AIDS patients a year. However, some anti-TB drugs interfere with the effect of some anti-HIV drugs. Conversely, in about 20% of cases where a patient has both diseases, anti-HIV drugs make the tuberculosis worse. The upshot is that 125 years after human beings worked out what caused TB, it is still a serious threat.

单选题Divorce is the act by which a valid marriage is dissolved, usually freeing the parties to remarry. In regions in (1) ancient (2) authority still predominates, divorce may be (3) and rare, especially when, as among Roman Catholics and Hindus, the religious (4) views marriage (5) indissoluble. Custom, (6) , may make divorce a simple matter in (7) societies. (8) some Pueblo Indian tribes a woman could divorce her husband (9) leaving his moccasins on the doorstep. The (10) of individual determination and mutual (11) are making divorce (12) acceptable in the (13) parts of the world. Among premodern societies, the rate of marital stability is difficult to (14) (15) the varying definitions of (16) and divorce. It seems to be broadly true (17) wherever divorce is a legal impossibility the wedding is a well-defined event conducted with (18) formality. The (19) principle does not hold true: elaborate marriage ceremonial is quite compatible with high divorce rates. Many anthropologists agree that divorce is generally more permissible in matrilineal societies (20) in patrilineal ones, in which the procreative and sexual rights of the bride are often symbolically transferred to the husband with the payment of bride-price.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Centuries ago, man discovered that removing moisture from food helps to preserve it, and that the easiest way to do this is to expose the food to sun and wind. In this way the North American Indians produce pemmican, the Scandinavians make stockfish and the Arabs dry dates and apricot leather. All foods contain water-cabbage and other leaf vegetables contain as much as 93% water, potatoes and other root vegetables 80%, lean meat 75% and fish anything from 80% to 60% depending on how fatty it is. If this water is removed, the activity of the bacteria that cause food to deteriorate is checked. Fruit is sun-dried in Asia Minor, Greece, Spain and other Mediterranean countries, and also in California, South Africa and Australia. The methods used vary, but in general, the fruit is spread out on trays in drying yards in the hot sun. In order to prevent darkening, pears, peaches and apricots are exposed to the fumes of burning sulfur before drying. Plums, for making prunes, and certain varieties of grapes for making raisins and currants, are dipped in an alkaline solution in order to crack the skins of the fruit slightly and remove their wax coating, so increasing the rate of drying. Nowadays most foods are dried mechanically. The conventional method of such dehydration is to put food in chambers through which hot air is blown at temperatures of about 110℃ at entry to about 43℃ at exit. This is the usual method for drying such things as vegetables, minced meat, and fish. Liquids such as milk, coffee, tea, soups and eggs may be dried by pouring them over a heated horizontal steel cylinder or by spraying them into a chamber through which a current of hot air passes. In the first case, the dried material is scraped off the roller as a thin film which is then broken up into small, though still relatively coarse flakes;" in the second process it falls to the bottom of the chamber as a fine powder. Where recognizable pieces of meat and vegetables are required, as in soup, the ingredients are dried separately and then mixed. Dried foods take up less room and weigh less than the same food packed in cans or frozen, and they do not need to be stored in special conditions. For these reasons they are invaluable to climbers, explorers and soldiers in battle, who have little storage space. They are also popular with housewives because it takes so little time to cook them. Usually it is just a case of replacing the dried-out moisture with boiling water.

单选题After decades of exile from U.S. courts, the science of lie detection is gaining new acceptance. But the federal government wants to put a stop to it, and the U.S. Supreme Court has now agreed to consider a request from the Department of Justice to bar the technology from military courts. Uncertainties surround the science of lie detection, which uses a device called polygraph. In 1991 President George Bush banned lie detector evidence in military courts. But that ban has since been overturned by the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, which ruled that it restricts defendants' rights to present evidence of their innocence. In the past two years, some federal courts have also ruled that polygraph evidence can be heard. This follows a decision by the Supreme Court in 1993 that gave federal judges more discretion to decide on the admissibility of evidence. A polygraph consists of monitors for pulse rate, sweating and breathing rate. The device is supposed to uncover lies by recording increases in these measures as the subject answers questions. Critics have always argued that cunning defendants can control their physiological responses and sway polygraph results. But supporters of the technique argue that recent research has found it to be reliable. A psychologist named Charles Honts at a state university in Idaho, points to lab oratory studies, some of them being his own, in which student-subjects were offered cash to sway the test results. This argument is rejected by Leonard Saxe, a psychologist at a Boston university. "There is a huge difference between students in a lab and a defendant," he says. Guilty defendants have time in which to rehearse their lies, and can even come to believe them to be true. Saxe believes that the entire theoretical basis of lie detection is invalid. "It assumes you will be more nervous lying than telling the truth." But he says that for some people lies are trivial, while certain truth can be hard to swallow. David Faigrnan of the University of California says that if the Supreme Court upholds the military appeal court's decision to allow polygraph evidence, polygraph bans. would be overturned in federal courts across U. S. "That will put a big burden on judges to understand the science, and lead to a lot more' expert testimony in the courts," he predicts. The justice department fears that this will greatly increase the cost of trials.

单选题The history of modem pollution problems shows that most have resulted from negligence and ignorance. We have an appalling tendency to interfere with nature before all of the possible consequences of our actions have been studied in depth. We produce and distribute radioactive substances, synthetic chemicals and many other potent compounds before fully comprehending their effects on living organisms. Our education is dangerously incomplete. It will be argued that the purpose of science is to move into unknown territory, to explore, and to discover. It can be said that similar risks have been taken before, and that these risks are necessary to technological progress. These arguments overlook an important element. In the past, risks taken in the name of scientific progress were restricted to a small place and brief period of time. The effects of the processes we now strive to master are neither localized nor brief. Air pollution covers vast urban areas. Ocean pollutants have been discovered in nearly every part of the world. Synthetic chemicals spread over huge stretches of forest and farmland may remain in the soil for decades and years to come. Radioactive pollutants will be found in the biosphere for generations. The size and persistence of these problems have grown with the expanding power of modern science. One might also argue that the hazards of modem pollutants are small compared with the dangers associated with other human activity. No estimate of the actual harm done by smog, fallout, or chemical residues can obscure the reality that the risks are being taken before being fully understood. The importance of these issues lies in the failure of science to predict and control human intervention into natural processes. The true measure of the danger is represented by the hazards we will encounter if we enter the new age of technology without first evaluating our responsibility to environment.

单选题Para. 6 mainly discusses ______.

单选题Persons' remarks are mentioned at the beginning of the text to______.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Europe is desperate to succeed in business. Two years ago, the European Union's Lisbon summit set a goal of becoming the world's leading economy by 2010. But success, as any new- age executive coach might tell you, requires confronting the fear of failure. That is why Europe's approach to bankruptcy urgently needs reform. In Europe, as in the United States, many heavily indebted companies are shutting up shop just as the economy begins to recover. Ironically, the upturn is often the moment when weak firms finally fail. But America's failures have a big advantage over Europe's weaklings: their country's more relaxed approach to bankruptcy. In the United States the Chapter 11 law makes going bust an orderly and even routine process. Firms in trouble simply apply for breathing space from creditors. Managers submit a plan of reorganization to a judge, and creditors decide whether to give it a go or to come up with one of their own. Creditors have a say in whether to keep the firm running, or to liquidate it. If they keep it running, they often end up with a big chunk of equity, if not outright control. But shutting a bust European company is harder in two other ways. First, with no equivalent of Chapter 11, bankruptcy forces companies to stop trading abruptly. That damages the value of the creditors' potential assets, and may also cause havoc for customers. Second, a company that trades across the European Union will find that it has to abide by different bankruptcy laws in the 15 member states, whose courts and administrators may make conflicting and sometimes incompatible stipulations. The absence of provision for negotiations between companies and creditors increases the temptation for government to step in. When governments do not come to the rescue, the lack of clear rules can lead to chaos. As a result of all this, Europe's teetering firms miss the chance to become more competitive by selling assets to others who might manage them more efficiently. Their sickly American rivals survive, transformed, to sweep the field. An opportunity now exists to think again about Europe's approach to bankruptcy. The European Union is expected to issue a new directive on the subject in May. Germany has begun to update its insolvency law. And last year Britain produced a white paper saying that a rigid approach to bankruptcy could stifle the growth needed to meet Lisbon's goals.

单选题According to the organization of the text, it most likely appeared in

单选题 Karl Von Linne (or Linnaeus, as he is widely known) was a Swedish biologist who devised the system of Latinised scientific names for living things that biologists use to this day. When he came to{{U}} (1) {{/U}}people into his system, he put them into a group called Homo- and Linne ' s hairless fellow humans are still known biologically as Homo sapiens.{{U}} (2) {{/U}}the group originally had a second member, Homo troglodytes. It lived in Africa, and the pictures show it to be covered{{U}} (3) {{/U}}hair. Modern{{U}} (4) {{/U}}are not as generous as Linne in welcoming other species into Man's lofty{{U}} (5) {{/U}},and the chimpanzee is now referred to {{U}}(6) {{/U}}Pan troglodytes. But Pan or Homo, there is no{{U}} (7) {{/U}}that chimps are humans' nearest living relatives, and that if the secrets of what makes humanity special are ever to be{{U}} (8) {{/U}}, understanding why chimps are not people, nor people chimps, is a crucial part of the process. That, in turn, means looking at the DNA of the two species,{{U}} (9) {{/U}}it is here that the{{U}} (10) {{/U}}must originate. One half of the puzzle has been{{U}} (11) {{/U}}for several years: the human genome was published in 2001. The second has now been added, with the announcement in this week's Nature{{U}} (12) {{/U}}the chimpanzee genome has been sequenced as well. For those expecting{{U}} (13) {{/U}}answers to age-old questions{{U}} (14) {{/U}}, the publication of the chimp genome may be something of an{{U}} (15) {{/U}}. There are no immediately obvious genes-present in one, but not the other-that account for such characteristic human{{U}} (16) {{/U}}as intelligence or even hairlessness. And{{U}} (17) {{/U}}there is a gene connected with language, known as FOXP2, it had already been discovered. But although the preliminary comparison of the two genomes{{U}} (18) {{/U}}by the members of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analyssis Consortium, the multinational team that generated the sequence, did not{{U}} (19) {{/U}}any obvious nuggets of genetic gold, it does at least show where to look for{{U}} (20) {{/U}}.

单选题St. Paul didn't like it. Moses warned his people against it. Hesiod declared it "mischievous" and "hard to get rid of it," but Oscar Wilder said, "Gossip is charming." "History is merely gossip," he wrote in one of his famous plays. "But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality." In past time, under Jewish law, gossipmongers might be fined or flogged. The Puritans put them in stocks or ducking stools, but no punishment seemed to have-the desired effect of preventing gossip, which has continued uninterruptedly across the back fences of the centuries. Today, however, the much-maligned human foible is being looked at in a different light. Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, even evolutionary biologists are concluding that gossip may not be so bad after all. Gossip is "an intrinsically valuable activity," philosophy professor Aaron Ben-Ze'ev states in a book he has edited, entitled Good Gossip. For one thing, gossip helps us acquire information that we need to know that doesn't come through ordinary channels, such as: "What was the real reason so-and-so was fired from. the office?" Gossip also is a form of social bonding, Dr. Ben-Ze'ev says. It is "a kind of sharing" that also "satisfies the tribal need--namely, the need to belong to and be accepted by a unique group." What's more, the professor notes, "Gossip is enjoyable." Another gossip groupie, Dr. Ronald De Sousa, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, describes gossip basically as a form of indiscretion and a "saintly virtue", by which he means that the knowledge spread by gossip will usually end up being slightly beneficial. "It seems likely that a world in which all information were universally available would be preferable to a world where immense power resides in the control of secrets," he writes. Still, everybody knows that gossip can have its ill effects, especially on the poor wretch being gossiped about. And people should refrain from certain kinds of gossip that might be harmful, even though the ducking stool is long out of fashion. By the way, there is also an interesting strain of gossip called medical gossip, which in its best form, according to researchers Jerry M. Suls and Franklin Goodkin, can motivate people with symptoms of serious illness, but who are unaware of it, to seek medical help. So go ahead and gossip. But remember, if (as often is the case among gossipers) you should suddenly become one of the gossipers instead, it is best to employ the foolproof defense recommended by Plato, who may have learned the lesson from Socrates, who as you know was the victim of gossip spread that he was corrupting the youth of Athens: when men speak ill of thee, so live that nobody will believe them. Or, as Will Rogers said, "Live so that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip./