单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} 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Computer brain games may not offer the big mental boost many were hoping for, suggests new research, but brain scientists and brain-game experts don't all agree on the findings. The study, out this week in Nature, is the largest of its kind, say scientists from England's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the Alzheimer's Society, UK. They said in a Tuesday press briefing that brain-training games, used by millions, may not increase general brain power on other tasks or increase IQ "Participants did get better at games they practiced. The more they trained, the better they got. But there was still no translation to any general improvement in cognitive function," said lead author Adrian Owen, assistant director of Medical Research Council. The online experiment was sponsored by the BBC and involved more than 11 000 people between the ages of 18 and 60. They were split into three groups, including two groups that played different brain-training games that are similar to commercially available games, and a control group that was asked to go online and find answers to questions about topics such as music. Participants trained for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week, for up to six weeks, Owen said. All took standard cognitive assessment tests at the start and finish of the study. While players increased their skills the more they played a specific game, that improvement didn't transfer to other activities or to a higher score on intelligence tests, said Owen and colleagues. Duke psychiatrist and Alzheimer's expert Murali Doraiswamy said it's the best study done to date and a good reality check. "There was so much hype surrounding brain games," he said. But it's not a death knell for gaming, Doraiswamy said. "I still think brain games offer tremendous potential for helping people with conditions such as ADHD and learning disabilities, but this study puts the burden of proof now on game manufacturers to show that they really offer meaningful benefits. " Study shortcomings include the fact that it didn't focus on the aging population, a group targeted by brain-game makers, experts said. And it did not look at benefits of more intense training, said Alvaro Fernandez, CEO and cofounder of Sharp Brains, a San Francisco market research firm that specializes in cognitive science. "This study shows random brain exercise doesn't transfer, but it does not deny that transfer can work if a person engages in more intense and targeted brain-training," Fernandez said.

单选题Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life. Or where he would prescribe drugs he knew would work and not have debilitating side-effects. Such a future is arriving faster than most realise: genetic tests are already widely used to identify patients who will be helped or harmed by certain drugs. And three years ago, in the face of a torrent of new scientific data, a number of new companies set themselves up to interpret this information for customers. Through shop fronts on the internet, anyone could order a testing kit, spit into a tube and send off their DNA—with results downloaded privately at home. Already customers can find out their response to many common medications, such as antivirals and blood-thinning agents. They can also explore their genetic likelihood of developing deep-vein thrombosis, skin cancer or glaucoma. The industry has been subject to conflicting criticisms. On the one hand, it stands accused of offering information too dangerous to trust to consumers; on the other it is charged with peddling irrelevant, misleading nonsense. For some rare disorders, such as Huntington's and Tay-Sachs, genetic information is a diagnosis. But most diseases are more complicated and involve several genes, or an environmental component, or both. Someone's chance of getting skin cancer, for example, will depend on whether he worships the sun as well as on his genes. America's Government Accountability Office (GAO) report also revealed what the industry has openly admitted for years: that results of disease-prediction tests from different companies sometimes conflict with one another, because there is no industry-wide agreement on standard lifetime risks. Governments hate this sort of anarchy and America's, in particular, is considering regulation. But three things argue against wholesale regulation. First, the level of interference needs to be based on the level of risk a test represents. The government does not need to be involved if someone decides to trace his ancestry or discover what type of earwax he has. Second, the laws on fraud should be sufficient to deal with the snake-oil salesmen who promise to predict, say, whether a child might be a sporting champion. And third, science is changing very fast. Fairly soon, a customer's whole genome will be sequenced, not merely the parts thought to be medically relevant that the testing companies now concentrate on, and he will then be able to crank the results through open-source interpretation software downloadable from anywhere on the planet. That will create problems, but the only way to stop that happening would be to make it illegal for someone to have his genome sequenced— and nobody is seriously suggesting that illiberal restriction. Instead, then, of reacting in a hostile fashion to the trend for people to take genetic tests, governments should be asking themselves how they can make best use of this new source of information. Restricting access to tests that inform people about bad reactions to drugs could do harm. The real question is not who controls access, but how to minimise the risks and maximise the rewards of a useful revolution.

单选题The telecity is a city whose life, direction, and functioning are largely shaped by telecommunications. In the twenty-first century; cities will be based more and more on an economy that is dependent on services and intellectual property. Telecommunications and information networks will define a city's architecture, shape, and character. Proximity in the telecity will be defined by the speed and bandwidth of networks as much as by geographical propinquity. In the, age of the telecity, New York and Singapore may be closer than, say, New York and Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Telecities will supersede megacities for several reasons, including the drive toward clean air, reducing pollution, energy conservation, more jobs based on services, and coping with the high cost of urban property. Now we must add the need to cope with terrorist threats in a high-technology world. Western mind-sets were clearly jolted in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and attacks in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. But the risks posed by twentieth-century patterns of urbanization and architecture have yet to register fully with political figures and leaders of industry. The Pentagon, for example, has been rebuilt in situation rather than distributed to multiple locations and connected by secure landlines and broadband wireless systems. Likewise, the reconstruction of the World Trade Center complex still represents a massive concentration of humanity and infrastructure. This is a remarkably shortsighted and dangerous vision of the future. The security risks, economic expenses, and environmental hazards of over centralization are everywhere, and they do not stop with skyscrapers and large governmental structures. There are risks also at seaports and airports, in food and water supplies, at nuclear power plants and hydroelectric turbines at major dams, in transportation systems, and in information and communications systems. This vulnerability applies not only to terrorist threats but also to human error, such as system-wide blackouts in North America in August 2003 and in Italy in September 2003, and natural disasters such as typhoons, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. Leaders and planners are only slowly becoming aware that over centralized facilities are the most vulnerable to attack or catastrophic destruction. There is also growing awareness that new broadband electronic systems now allow governments and corporations to safeguard their key assets and people in new and innovative ways. So far, corporations have been quickest to adjust to these new realities, and some governments have begun to adjust as well.

单选题The sentence "Newton would not take no for an answer" probably means _____.

单选题The best salespeople first establish a mood of trust and rapport by means of "hypnotic pacing" statements and gestures that play back a customer' s observations, experience, or behavior. Pacing is a kind of mirror-like matching, a way of suggesting: "I am like you. We are in sync. You can trust me." The simplest form of pacing is "descriptive pacing", in which the seller formulates accurate, if banal, descriptions of the customer's experience. "It's been awfully hot these last few days, hasn't it? ... You said you were going to graduate in June." These statements serve the purpose of establishing agreement and developing an unconscious affinity between seller and customer. In clinical hypnosis, the hypnotist might make comparable pacing statements. "You are ham today to see me for hypnosis." "You told me over the phone about a problem that concerns you." Sales agents with only average success tend to jump immediately into their memorized sales pitches or to hit the customer with a barrage of questions. Neglecting to pace the customer, the mediocre sales agent creates no common ground on which to build trust. A second type of hypnotic pacing statement is the "objection pacing" comment. A customer objects or resists, and the sales agent agrees, matching his or her remarks to the remarks of the customer. A superior insurance agent might agree that "insurance is not the best investment out there", just as a clinical hypnotist might tell a difficult subject. "You are resisting going into trance. That's good. I encourage that." The customer, pushing against a wall, finds that the wall has disappeared. The agent, having confirmed the customer's objection, then leads the customer to a position that negates or undermines the objection. The insurance salesperson who agreed that "insurance is not the best investment out there" went on to tell his customer, "but it does have a few uses." He then described all the benefits of life insurance. Mediocre salespeople generally respond to resistance head-on, with arguments that presumably answer the customer's 0biection. This response often leads the customer to dig in his heels all the harder. The most powerful forms of pacing have more to do with how something is said than with what is said. The good salesperson has an ability to pace the language and thought of any customer. With hypnotic effect, the agent matches the voice tone, rhythm, volume, and speech rate of the customer. He matches the customer's posture, body language, and mood. He adopts the characteristic verbal language of the customer. If the customer is slightly depressed, the agent chares that feeling and acknowledges that he has been feeling "a little down" lately. Ill essence, the top sales producer becomes a sophisticated biofeedback mechanism, sharing and reflecting the customer's reality—even to the point of breathing in and out with the customer.

单选题In Line 6, Para. 3, the author use the expression of "learn the hard way" to mean that

单选题The last three sentences in the passage serve to

单选题The human Y chromosome--the DNA chunk that makes a man a man—has lost so many genes over evolutionary time that some scientists have suspected it might disappear in 10 million years. But a new study says it'll stick around. Researchers found no sign of gene loss over the past 6 million years, suggesting the chromosome is "doing a pretty good job of maintaining itself," said researcher David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. That agrees with prior mathematical calculations that suggested the rate of gene loss would slow as the chromosome evolved, Page and study co-authors note in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. And, they say, it clashes with what Page called the "imminent demise" idea that says the Y chromosome is doomed to extinction. The Y appeared 300 million years ago and has since eroded into a dinky chromosome, because it lacks the mechanism other chromosomes have to get rid of damaged DNA. So mutations have disabled hundreds of its original genes, causing them to be shed as useless. The Y now contains only 27 genes or families of virtually identical genes. In 2003, Page reported that the modern-day Y has an unusual mechanism to fix about half of its genes and protect them from disappearing. But he said some scientists disagreed with his conclusion. The new paper focuses on a region of the Y chromosome where genes can't be fixed that way. Researchers compared the human and chimpanzee versions of this region. Humans and chimps have been evolving separately for about 6 million years, so scientists reasoned that the comparisons would reveal genes that have become disabled in one species or the other during that time. They found five such genes on the chimp chromosome, but none on the human chromosome, an imbalance Page called surprising. "It looks like there has been little if any gene loss in our own species lineage in the last 6 million years," Page said. That contradicts the idea that the human Y chromosome has continued to lose genes so fast it'll disappear in 10 million years, he said. "I think we can with confidence dismiss ... the 'imminent demise' theory," Page said. Jennifer A. Marshall Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra, a gene researcher who argues for eventual extinction of the Y chromosome, called Page's work "beautiful" but said it didn't shake her conviction that the Y is doomed. The only real question is when, not if, the Y chromosome disappears, she said. "It could be a lot shorter than 10 million years, but it could be a lot longer," she said. The Y chromosome has already disappeared in some other animals, and "there's no reason to expect it can't happen to humans," she said. If it happened in people, some other chromosome would probably take over the sex-determining role of the Y, she said.

单选题Until recently, the common factor in all the science used to figure out if a piece of art was forged was that it was concerned with the medium of the artwork, rather than the art itself. Matters of style and form were left to art historians, who could make erudite,, but qualitative, judgments about whether a painting was really good enough to be, say, a Leonardo. But this is changing. A paper in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Hany Farid and his colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire uses statistical techniques to examine art itself--the message, not the medium. Dr. Farid employed a technique called wavelet analysis to examine 13 drawings that had at one time or another been attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a 16th-century Flemish painter. He also looked at Perugino's "Madonna with Child", a 15th-century Italian - masterpiece lodged in the college's Hood Museum of Art. He concluded, in agreement with art historians, that eight of the putative Bruegels are authentic, while the other five are imitations. In the case of "Madonna with Child", he analysed the six faces in the painting (Mary, the infant Jesus and several saints) and found that three of them were probably done by the same painter, while the other three were each done by a different hand. The view that four different painters worked on the canvas is, he says, consistent with the view of some art historians that Perugino's apprentices did much of the work, although there is no clear consensus among art historians. As sceptics will doubtless point out, this is a small number of images. Furthermore, Dr. Farid knew before performing the analysis what results he expected. But he is the first to acknowledge that it is early days for his methodology. He hopes to study many more paintings. By looking at large numbers of paintings that are universally believed to be authentic, Dr. Farid hopes to be able to examine doubtful cases with confidence in the future. Even with the Bruegels--real and imitation--though, Dr. Farid's results are persuasive. It is tricky to describe exactly what it is that distinguishes the real ones from the imitations, but Dr. Farid says that it can be thought of as the nature of the artist's brushstroke. Unlike some analyses of Jackson Pollock's work that have been done over the past few years by Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon, Dr. Farid says his technique could, in principle, be used for any artist. What Dr. Farid did was to convert each work of art into a set of mathematical functions. These so-called wavelets describe particular parts of the image as a series of peaks and troughs of variable height and wavelength. By expressing an image this way, it is possible to compress that image while losing very little information. The sums of the wavelets from different images can then be compared. Once he did this, Dr. Farid found that the types of wavelets used to express authentic Bruegels were noticeably different from those used to express the imitations. (The Perugino was analysed by treating the six faces as distinct paintings.) It seems that curators may s6on be able to add another weapon to their anti-forgery arsenal.

单选题Soon after his appointment as secretary-general of the United Nations in 1997, Kofi Annan lamented that he was being accused of failing to reform the world body in six weeks. "But what are you complaining about?" asked the Russian ambassador. "You've had more time than God." Ah, Mr. Annan quipped back, "but God had one big advantage. He worked alone without a General Assembly, a Security Council and [all] the committees." Recounting that anecdote to journalists in New York this week, Mr. Annan sought to explain why a draft declaration on UN reform and tackling world poverty, due to be endorsed by some 150 heads of state and government at a world summit in the city on September 14th-16th, had turned into such a pale shadow of the proposals that he himself had put forward in March. "With 191 member states", he sighed, "it's not easy to get an agreement." Most countries put the blame on the United States, in the form of its abrasive new ambassador, John Bolton, for insisting at the end of August on hundreds of last-minute amendments and a line-by-line renegotiation of a text most others had thought was almost settled. But a group of middle-income developing nations, including Pakistan, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, Syria and Venezuela, also came up with plenty of last-minute changes of their own. The risk of having no document at all, and thus nothing for the world's leaders to come to New York for, was averted only by marathon all-night and all-weekend talks. The 35-page final document is not wholly devoid of substance. It calls for the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission to supervise the reconstruction of countries after wars; the replacement of the discredited UN Commission on Human Rights by a supposedly tougher Human Rights Council; the recognition of a new "responsibility to protect" peoples from genocide and other atrocities when national authorities fail to take action, including, if necessary, by force; and an "early" reform of the Security Council. Although much pared down, all these proposals have at least survived. Others have not. Either they proved so contentious that they were omitted altogether, such as the sections on disarmament and non-proliferation and the International Criminal Court, or they were watered down to little more than empty platitudes. The important section on collective security and the use of force no longer even mentions the vexed issue of pre-emptive strikes; meanwhile the section on terrorism condemns it "in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes", but fails to provide the clear definition the Americans wanted. Both Mr. Annan and, more surprisingly, George Bush have nevertheless sought to put a good face on things, with Mr. Annan describing the summit document as "an important step forward" and Mr. Bush saying the UN had taken "the first steps" towards reform. Mr. Annan and Mr. Bolton are determined to go a lot further. It is now up to the General Assembly to flesh out the document's skeleton proposals and propose new ones. But its chances of success appear slim.

单选题With the usual flood of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, there comes a multi-cultural work force. Along with this diversity comes resentment felt by natives in the marketplace. Feelings of antagonism surface when accents are strong and foreign languages are used that some workers cannot understand. There is now a clash of forces in the workplace; the battle is centered on English-only policies. A growing number of workers are alleging discrimination on the basis of language. The federal law prohibiting job discrimination comes under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title Ⅶ), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. National-origin discrimination makes it illegal to discriminate against an individual because of birthplace, ancestry, and culture or linguistic characteristics common to a specific ethnic group. A rule requiring that employees speak only English on the job may violate Title VII unless an employer shows that the requirement is necessary for conducting the business. If the employer believes such a rule is necessary, employees must be informed of when English is required and the consequences for violating the rule. Donna Fernandez, language rights attorney at the Employment Law Center of San Francisco, finds that language discrimination is very prevalent in the workplace. Fernandez states that the biases may include "English-only policies when the employee"s primary language is other than English" or "some people may be treated differently because they speak with an accent." It is illegal for an employer to discriminate against an employee because of language. However, the increase in language discrimination suits indicates that employers are treating employees speaking with an accent or in a foreign language differently. "Many companies don"t know they are breaking the law with the English-only policies," says Fernandez. The law in this area is still developing and many courts consider these policies to be a form of discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. (National origin refers to the country that a person, or that person"s ancestors, came from.) Employees can challenge a speak-English-only policy if: the rule is applied to employees who speak no English; they have difficulty speaking English; or the policy creates, or is part of, a work environment that is hostile toward national origin minority employees. An employer must show some "business necessity" for the policy. Even if there is a business need, the policy is still illegal if there are less discriminatory alternative to the policy. Sibylle Gruber, assistant professor of English at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Ariz., finds that employees may feel they are viewed as less intelligent if they cannot speak English perfectly. "Workers may miss out on promotions to positions of authority if they can"t express themselves or communicate clearly," says Gruber. Often, there are subtle prejudices against some accents more than others. Speaking with a French or British accent is less frowned upon than a Spanish or Vietnamese accent. By not promoting employees because of an accent or language bias, a ghetto effect is created in the work force, keeping certain accents and immigrants in low-level positions.

单选题One of the many pleasures of watching Mad Men, a television drama about the advertising industry in the early 1960s, is examining the ways in which office life has changed over the years. One obvious change makes people feel good about themselves: they no longer treat women as second-class citizens. But the other obvious change makes them feel a bit more uneasy: they have lost the art of enjoying themselves at work. The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialised not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk. Nowadays many companies are obsessed with fun. Software firms in Silicon Valley have installed rock-climbing walls in their reception areas and put inflatable animals in their offices. Wal-Mart orders its cashiers to smile at all and sundry. The cult of fun has spread like some disgusting haemorrhagic disease. This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves on devolving power to front-line workers. But surveys show that only 20% of workers are" fully engaged with their job ". Even fewer are creative. Managers hope that " fun" will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite—at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition. The most unpleasant thing about the fashion for fun is that it is mixed with a large dose of pressure. Boston Pizza encourages workers to send" golden bananas" to colleagues who are "having fun while being the best". Behind the" fun" there often lurks some crude management thinking: a desire to brand the company as better than its rivals, or a plan to boost productivity through team-building. Twitter even boasts that it has" worked hard to create an environment that spawns productivity and happiness". While imposing fake fun on their employees, companies are battling against the real thing. Many force smokers to huddle outside like furtive criminals. Few allow their employees to drink at lunch time, let alone earlier in the day. A regiment of busybodies— from lawyers to human resources functionaries—is waging war on office romance, particularly between people of different ranks. The merchants of fake fun have met some resistance. When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff—such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with coworkers—it touched off a guerrilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006. But such victories are rare. For most wage slaves forced to pretend they are having fun at work, the only relief is to poke fun at their tormentors. Mad Men reminds people of a world they have lost—a world where bosses did not tbink that"fun" was a management tool and where employees could happily quaff Scotch at noon. Cheers to that.

单选题According to this introduction, the best way to use this book is______.

单选题According to the text, which of the following is true of wages in southern cities in 1910?