单选题What does Stelios mean by talking about funerals?

单选题According to the author, there is a trend______.

单选题The cellphone, a device we have lived with for more than a decade, offers a good example of a popular technology's unforeseen side effects. More than one billion are (1) use around the world, and when asked, their (2) say they love their phones for the safety and convenience (3) provide. People also report that they are (4) in their use of their phones. One opinion survey (5) that "98 percent of Americans say they move away from (6) when talking on a wireless phone in public" (7) "86 percent say they 'never' or 'rarely' speak (8) wireless phones" when conducting (9) with clerks or bank tellers. Clearly, there exists a (10) between our reported cellphone behavior and our actual behavior. Cellphone users that is to say, most of us are (11) instigators and victims of this form of conversational panhandling, and it (12) a cumulatively negative effect on social space. As the sociologist Erving Gotfman observed in another (13) , there is something deeply disturbing about people who are" (14) contact" in social situations because they are blatantly refusing to (15) to the norms of their immediate environment. Placing a cellphone call in public instantly transforms the strangers around you (16) unwilling listeners who must cede to your use of the public (17) . a decidedly undemocratic effect for so democratic a technology. Listeners don't always passively (18) this situation: in recent years, people have been pepper-sprayed in movie theaters, (19) from concert halls and deliberately rammed with cars as a result of (20) behavior on their cellphones.

单选题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Compared with traditional hotels, the buy-to-let hotel

单选题The great recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. And ultimately, it is likely to reshape our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years. No one tries harder than the jobless to find silver linings in this national economic disaster. Many said that unemployment, while extremely painful, had improved them in some ways: they had become less materialistic and more financially prudent; they were more aware of the struggles of others. In limited respects, perhaps the recession will leave society better off. At the very least, it has awoken us from our national fever dream of easy riches and bigger houses, and put a necessary end to an era of reckless personal spending. But for the most part, these benefits seem thin, uncertain, and far off. In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, the economic historian Benjamin Friedman argues that both inside and outside the U.S., lengthy periods of economic stagnation or decline have almost always left society more mean-spirited and less inclusive, and have usually stopped or reversed the advance of rights and freedoms. Anti-immigrant sentiment typically increases, as does conflict between races and classes. Income inequality usually falls during a recession, but it has not shrunk in this one. Indeed, this period of economic weakness may reinforce class divides, and decrease opportunities to cross them—especially for young people. The research of Till Von Wachter, the economic at Columbia University, suggests that not all people graduating into a recession see their life chances dimmed: those with degrees from elite universities catch up fairly quickly to where they otherwise would have been if they had graduated in better times; it is the masses beneath them that are left behind. In the Internet age, it is particularly easy to see the resentment that has always been hidden within American society. More difficult, in the moment, is discerning precisely how these lean times are affecting society"s character. In many respects, the U.S. was more socially tolerant entering this recession than at any time in its history, and a variety of national polls on social conflict since then have shown mixed results. We will have to wait and see exactly how these hard times will reshape our social fabric. But they certainly will reshape it, and all the more so the longer they extend.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} It was the best of times or, depending on your political and philosophical outlook, one of the foulest and most depraved. Rebellion seemed to be leaping from city to city, continent to continent, by some fiery process of contagion. Radical students filled the streets of Mexico city, Berlin, Tokyo, Prague. In the U. S. , Chicago swirled into near anarchy as cops battled antiwar demonstrators gathered at the Democratic Convention. And everywhere from Amsterdam to Haight-Ashbury, a generation was getting high, acting up. So, clearly, it was the year from hell--a collective "dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction," as the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently. Or, depending again on your outlook, a global breakthrough for the human spirit. On this, the 25th anniversary of 1968, probably the only thing we can all agree on is that '68 marks the beginning of the "culture wars," which have divided America ever since. Both the sides of the "culture wars" of the '80s and '90s took form in the critical year of'68. The key issues are different now--abortion and gay rights, for example, as opposed to Vietnam and racism--but the underlying themes still echo the clashes of '68: Diversity vs. conformity, tradition vs. iconoclasm, self-expression vs. deference to norms. "Question authority," in other words, vs. "Father knows best." The 25th anniversary of '68 is a good time to reflect, calmly and philosophically, on these deep, underlying choices. On one hand we know that anti-authoritarianism for its own sake easily degenerates into a rude and unfocused defiance: Revolution, as Abbie Hoffman put it, "for the hell of it." Certainly '68 had its wretched excesses as well as its moments of glory: the personal tragedy of lives undone by drugs and sex, the heavy cost of riots and destruction. One might easily conclude that the ancient rules and hierarchies are there for a reason--they're worked, more or less, for untold millenniums, so there's no point in changing them now. But it's also true that what "worked" for thousands of years may not be the best way of doing things. Democracy, after all, was onee a far-out, subversive notion, condemned by kings and priests. In our own country, it took all kinds of hell-raising, including a war, to get across the simple notion that no person is morally entitled to own another. One generation's hallowed tradition--slavery, or the divine right of kings--may be another generation's object lesson in human folly. '68 was one more awkward, stumbling, half-step forward in what Dutschke called the "long march" toward human freedom. Actually, it helped inspire the worldwide feminist movement.