单选题The author appears to be very approbatory that

单选题Which of the following countries has Miran not been to?

单选题In paragraph 6 the author implies that

单选题Why does the author say "Ricke doesn't have a lot of time" ?

单选题We can infer from the example of the woolly mammoth that

单选题The iPod revolutionized the way we consume music. The iPhone made us crazy for apps. And now the iPad is getting ready to rock our love lives—or at least help improve our search for someone to communicate with. In late May, Skout.com will become the first dating site to launch an iPad application. The free app will be similar to the version that's already available to phone users: members can enter search criteria, such as age range, gender and physical preferences, and a HotMap will show in real time the locations of active Skout users who fit those criteria. The idea is to help members meet up and see if magic happens. The cool thing about the iPad adaptation, says CEO Christian Wiklund, is that its screen is large enough to let the user view the map while simultaneously chatting and searching through another member's photos. David Evans, editor of onlinedatingpost.com, says we can expect to see more innovative technology in a few months after companies get acquainted with the capabilities of the iPad. "What I'm looking for are dating sites that are optimized for the iPad, with features native to the sleek computing device like (touch screen motions such as) pinch, twist, zoom and shake," he says. "It's the iPad that's going to enable developers to create entirely new ways to browse, discover and connect with singles." Steve Odom, CEO and founder of dating site Gelato, which launched last year and includes a live feed of members' social-media profiles, is redesigning his entire website based on the iPad's appearance. Profile pictures play a key role in online dating, Odom says, and the iPad gives sites an opportunity to play up the presentation of their clientele. "It's big, it's beautiful, and it's perfect for dating sites," says Odom, who plans to unveil the redesign in June. Evans predicts that online dating sites will begin to display their content like a magazine, letting users flip through pages of profiles and enlarge photos while simultaneously texting with one or more others. He says there's also been talk of adding a facial-coding and eye-tracking function that would use a webcam on the iPad to refine suggested matches based on a member's responses to certain profiles. If you grimace, the profile will fade away; if you smile or if your pupils dilate, similar profiles will be suggested. In other words, some day there could be an iPad app for love at first sight.

单选题It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most fight-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa. The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialisation of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180° relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the fight side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain is usually dominant. And on average, left-handers are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie thinks he knows the answer. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is tree, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr. Faurie set out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modem societies often involves the use of technology, notably firms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr. Faurie decided to confine his investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence in traditional societies. By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, Dr. Faurie found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, in- deed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1,000 inhabitants per year. And, according to Dr. Faufie, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0. 013 murders per 1,000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed. While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister".

单选题The tenant of the large estates is to______

单选题Many video games feature an invincibility power-up that makes the players impervious to damage, at least for a while. As the economic crisis hit in late 2008, some said the same about the industry itself. The theory went that sales of video games, which had been strong in 2008, would also be strong in 2009, because games are a relatively cheap form of entertainment that let people escape from gloomy economic reality. At first glance the sales figures seem to debunk the idea that video games are recession-proof. In June 2009, for example, sales of games in America were 31% lower than in June 2008, according to NPD, a market-research firm. In July sales were down 26% , the fifth successive monthly decline. But the year ended with a record-breaking December, as people bought consoles and games for Christmas. Globally, says Piers Harding-Rolls of Screen Digest, a consuhancy, sales of games were down by 6.3% in 2009. The number of Nintendo Win and Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles sold was flat in 2009 ; sales of Sow's PlayStation 3 were up by 22% after a price cut. In some respects, this stumble reflects gaming's new popularity. When it was less of a mainstream activity it was not so connected to the wider economic cycle. The success of the family-friendly Wii has broadened gaming's appeal, but the new players it has attracted are less fanatical garners who are more likely to cut back in hard times. During 2009 more people turned to mobile, web-based or second-hand games, says Mr Harding-Rofls. Another way of looking at things, however, is to say that spending on gaming is driven by big hits, and that the slight decline in 2009 reflects creative rather than economic weakness. Entertainment industries always have their ups and downs, says Shigeru Miyamoto, the creative force behind many of Nintendo's biggest games. There was an unusually large number of hits in 2008, which boosted sales, and fewer big releases in 2009 until late in the year, which may explain the weak mid-year sales. The biggest hit was "Modern Warfare 2", released in November, which became the fastest-selling game in history, selling 7 million copies worldwide on its first day. The top 20 games took a larger share of sales in 2009 than in 2008, which shows that the games industry is becoming increasingly polarised between hits and misses. Hence the hit-and-miss results of the big publishers of video games. Overall, says Mr Miyamoto, 2009's crop of games may just have been less compelling. "We were not able to produce fun-enough products," he says. That highlights the importance of continued innovation, he says—but it leaves unanswered the question of whether gaming is indeed recession-proof.

单选题 In response to scandals rocking the student loan industry, the House has quickly passed reform legislation to require more disclosure from lenders as well as university codes of conduct, and Senate action is expected. But the larger issues of rising college costs and students' increasing dependence on private loans have, for the moment at least, taken a back seat. Yet that doesn't mean they've gone away. College costs have risen far faster than inflation and also outpaced the growth of grant aid and federal loans. Pell grants, for example, which provide money to low-income students, covered nearly 60 percent of the cost of attending a public four-year school in 1986, but by 2005, their value had dropped to 33 percent of the cost, according to the College Board. As a result, more students must turn to costly private loans to finance their education or not go at all. The cost of information technology, the increasing salaries of tenured professors, and even federal loans themselves have all been blamed for college tuition hikes. On the last point, an analysis by the Cato Institute suggests that when aid is provided by the federal government, states and universities reduce their own efforts to make college affordable. Whatever the causes, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent committee created by Congress, estimates that 400,000 students who are qualified to attend a four-year college don't do so each year because of financial restrictions. The committee estimates that roughly 40 percent of this group does not attend college at all, which significantly limits future earnings. Many students who do go to college face daunting piles of debt. The College Board estimates that the median debt level of bachelor's degree recipients was ＄19,300 in the 2003-04 school year. In his fiscal 2008 budget, President Bush proposed increasing the maximum Pell grant award to ＄5,400 by 2012 from ＄4,050 today, a change he would pay for with cuts in other loan programs. Even though the scandals are dominating most of the current discussions on Capitol Hill, some education experts praise the fact that student loans are getting any attention at all. Stephen Burd, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, says, "This is the first time everyone is dealing with the reality of the fact that private loans have become essential financing for undergraduates."

单选题If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in 2006"s World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this strange phenomenon to be even more pronounced. What might account for this strange phenomenon? Here are a few guesses: a.certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills;b.winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina;c.soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania;d.none of the above. Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in "none of the above." Ericsson grew up in Sweden, and studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. "With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20," Ericsson recalls. "He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers." This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever inborn differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers. Their work makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers—whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming—are nearly always made, not born.

单选题That boys and girls—and men and women—are programmed by evolution to behave differently from one another is now widely accepted. But which of the differences between the sexes are "biological", in the sense that they have been honed by evolution, and which are "cultural" or "environmental" and might more easily be altered by changed circumstances, is still fiercely debated. The sensitivity of the question was shown last year by an uproar at Harvard University. Larry Summers, then Harvard's president, caused a storm when he suggested that innate ability could be an important reason why there were so few women in the top positions in mathematics, engineering and the physical sciences. Even as a proposition for discussion, this is unacceptable to some. But biological explanations of human behavior are making a comeback. The success of neo-Darwinism has provided an intellectual foundation for discussion about why some differences between the sexes might be innate. And new scanning techniques have enabled researchers to examine the brain's interior while it is working, showing that male and female brains do, at one level, operate differently. The results, however, do not always support past clichés about what the differences in question actually are. Another behavioral difference that has borne a huge amount of scrutiny is in mathematics, particularly since Dr Summers'comments. The problem with trying to argue that the male tendency to systemize might lead to greater mathematical ability is that, in fact, girls and boys are equally good at maths prior to teenage years. Until recently, it was believed that males outperformed females in mathematics at all ages. Today, that picture has changed, and it appears that males and females of any age are equally good at computation and at understanding mathematical concepts. However, after their mid-teens, men are better at problem solving than women are. The question raised by Dr Summers does not get to the heart of the matter. Over the past 50 years, women have made huge progress into academia and within it. Slowly, they have worked their way into the higher echelons of discipline after discipline. But some parts of the ivory tower have proved harder to occupy than others. The question remains, to what degree is the absence of women in science, mathematics and engineering caused by innate, immutable ability? Innate it may well be. That does not mean it is immutable. A variety of abilities are amenable to training in both sexes. And such training works. Biology may predispose, but it is not necessarily destiny.

单选题 Advice to would-be culture warriors in the 21st century: walk softly and carry a big thesaurus-a dictionary of classified synonyms. According to the conventional wisdom, the culture wars are over in Washington-or, at the very least, reduced to minor disputes. Buoyed by the support of centrist, socially conservative Christians, the Obama administration has ushered in a new era of conciliation. Ideological opponents-especially those on either side of the abortion issue-are now trying to establish common ground. A first order of business is "abortion reduction," a seemingly non-controversial and praiseworthy goal. By agreeing that abortion is a complex moral issue and that it should be less frequent, former enemies can work together to find ways to reduce abortions. Beneath all the optimism though, tensions continue to boil, and it can seem that differences between the old culture wars and the new ones are merely differences in tone and tactics, not in ideology. In previous eras, warriors fought with rhetorical arguments; now they use new semantic weapons so sharp they could split a hair. On both sides, people say they want abortion reduction. But listen carefully to how they say it. On the left, the so-called common ground advocates talk about reducing the need for abortion, while on the right, folks talk about reducing the number of abortions. The way you talk about your desire for common ground, it turns out, signals whose side you're actually on. The left wants to reduce demand for abortion; the right wants to reduce supply. Inside the Beltway, these seemingly invisible semantic differences have big policy implications, for the inevitable question arises: how do folks intend to reduce abortions? Two bills currently in Congress point to the deep, ideological differences that continue to linger. The Pregnant Women Support Act, favored mostly by pro-life groups, provides financial support especially for poor and younger mothers who want to carry their pregnancies to term. The Prevention First Act, favored mostly by pro-choice groups, funds contraception (the practice of preventing a woman from becoming pregnant when she has sex) and comprehensive sex education especially to poor and younger women. The conversation about "abortion reduction" then, is not really about abortion but about other hot-button issues: birth control, premarital sex, teen sex and sex education. Outside the Beltway, who really cares? According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll from August 2008, 54 percent of Americans support legal abortion in all or most cases-exactly the same percentage as a decade ago. It's hard to imagine anyone arguing with the basic premise: in an ideal world, fewer American women would seek abortions. How our government achieves that end matters; how activists talk about achieving it matters not at all.

单选题In Paris, a popular new bike rental program called Velib (a slang combination of the French words velo, for bike, and liberty, for liberty) was introduced. (1) The bikes, which are available from over 1,421 stations around the city, can be rented on a half-hourly basis (1 euro for the first half hour and 2 euros for the second half hour) or people can pay 29 euros for an entire year of bike riding. Riders can pick up the bike at one station and return it to any of the other stations scattered approximately 300 meters apart around the city. This system is meant to encourage riders to use the bikes as they would be a car or public transport. The ultimate goal, of course, is to reduce pollution in the city. But the mayor has also said that he likes the idea of Parisians and tourists alike enjoying the city by bicycle. The bike program—which started in Lyon—has become extremely popular with Parisians of all ages. Although riders must be at least 14 years old and 1.5 meters tall, these restrictions have not stopped teenagers from using the bikes to go out at night. "You can ride them home after a party, when the metro (the subway system in Paris) is closed," explained Agathe Deschamps, 14, who uses Velib to get to school sometimes. In fact, the Velib is so popular that enthusiasts often have to visit two or three stations before finding an available bike. At a recent dinner party, one guest excused herself for arriving so late because she couldn't find a Velib. Although helmets (头盔) are not required by French law, they are strongly recommended and rides of the road are spelled out on the Velib website. An increase in bicycle-related accidents has been inevitable despite the addition of some 371 kilometers of bike paths in the city. (2)And some riders complain that the pearl gray bikes, which feature baskets and rear lights that turn on automatically when the bike moves, do not have rear-view mirrors. After all, the city plans to have over 20,600 bikes circulating by December.