单选题The author writes this passage mainly to show that ______.

单选题Twenty-seven years ago, Egypt revised its secular constitution to enshrine Muslim sharia as "the principal source of legislation". To most citizens, most of the time, that seeming contradiction-between secularism and religion-has not made much difference. Nine in ten Egyptians are Sunni Muslims and expect Islam to govern such things as marriage, divorce and inheritance. Nearly all the rest profess Christianity or Judaism, faiths recognised and protected in Islam. But to the small minority who embrace other faiths, or who have tried to leave Islam, it has, until lately, made an increasingly troubling difference. Members of Egypt's 2,000-strong Bahai community, for instance, have found they cannot state their religion on the national identity cards that all Egyptians are obliged to produce to secure such things as driver's licenses, bank accounts, social insurance and state schooling. Hundreds of Coptic Christians who have converted to Islam, often to escape the Orthodox sect's ban on divorce, find they cannot revert to their original faith. In some cases, children raised as Christians have discovered that, because a divorced parent converted to Islam, they too have become officially Muslim, and cannot claim otherwise. Such restrictions on religious freedom are not directly a product of sharia, say human- rights campaigners, but rather of rigid interpretations of Islamic law by over-zealous officials. In their strict view, Bahai belief cannot be recognised as a legitimate faith, since it arose in the 19th century, long after Islam staked its claim to be the final revelation in a chain of prophecies beginning with Adam. Likewise, they brand any attempt to leave Islam, whatever the circumstances, as a form of apostasy, punishable by death. But such views have lately been challenged. Last year Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti, who is the government's highest religious adviser, declared that nowhere in Islam's sacred texts did it say that apostasy need be punished in the present rather than by God in the afterlife. In the past month, Egyptian courts have issued two rulings that, while restricted in scope, should ease some bothersome strictures. Bahais may now leave the space for religion on their identity cards blank. Twelve former Christians won a lawsuit and may now return to their original faith, on condition that their identity documents note their previous adherence to Islam. Small steps, perhaps, but they point the way towards freedom of choice and citizenship based on equal rights rather than membership of a privileged religion.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} In the dimly lit cyber-cafe at Sciences-Po, hot-house of the French elite, no Gauloise smoke fills the air, no dog-eared copies of Sartre lie on the tables. French students are doing what all students do: surfing the web via Google. Now President Jacques Chirac wants to stop this American cultural invasion by setting up a rival French search-engine. The idea was prompted by Google' s plan to put online millions of texts from American and British university libraries. If English books are threatening to swamp cyberspace, Mr Chirac will not stand idly by. He asked his culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noel Jeanneney, head of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, to do the same for French texts—and create a home-grown search-engine to browse them. Why not let Google do the job? Its French version is used for 74% of internet searches in France. The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. "I do not believe" ,wrote Mr Donnedieu de Vabres in Le Monde, "that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google' s success." This is not the first time Google has met French resistance. A court has upheld a ruling against it, in a lawsuit brought by two firms that claimed its display of rival sponsored links (Google' s chief source of revenues) constituted trademark counterfeiting. The French state news agency, Agence France-Presse ,has also filed suit against Google for copyright infringement. Googlephobia is spreading. Mr Jeanneney has talked of the "risk of crushing domination by America in defining the view that future generations have of the world. "" I have nothing in particular against Google, "he told L' Express, a magazine. "I simply note that this commercial company is the expression of the American system, in which the law of the market is king. "Advertising muscle and consumer demand should not triumph over good taste and cultural sophistication. The flaws in the French plan are obvious. If popularity cannot arbitrate, what will? Mr Jeanneney wants a "committee of experts". He appears to be serious, though the supply of French-speaking experts, or experts speaking any language for that matter, would seem to be insufficient. And if advertising is not to pay, will the taxpayer? The plan mirrors another of Mr Chirac' s pet projects: a CNNà la francaise. Over a year ago, stung by the power of Englishspeaking television news channels in the Iraq war, Mr Chirac promised to set up a French rival by the end of 2004. The project is bogged down by infighting. France ' s desire to combat English, on the web or the airwaves, is understandable. Protecting France' s tongue from its citizens' inclination to adopt English words is an ancient hobby of the ruling elite. The Académie Francaise was set up in 1635 to that end. Linguists devise translations of cyber-terms, such as arrosage (spare) or bogue (bug). Laws limit the use of English on TV—" Super Nanny" and "Star Academy" are current pests—and impose translations of English slogans in advertising. Treating the invasion of English as a market failure that must be corrected by the state may look clumsy. In France it is just business as usual.

单选题Which of the following is true concerning stress on managers?

单选题The term "oomph" ( Line 4, Paragraph 3 ) in the text denotes

单选题If soldiering was for the money, the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS) would have disintegrated in recent years. Such has been the explosion in private military companies (PMCs) that they employ an estimated 30 000 in Iraq alone -- and no government can match their fat salaries. A young SAS trooper earns about￡ 2,000($3 500) a month; on the "circuit", as soldiers call the private world, he could get ￡15 000. Why would he not? For reasons both warm-hearted and cool-headed. First, for love of regiment and comrades, bonds that tend to be tightest in the most select units. Second, for the operational support, notably field medicine, and the security, including life assurance and pension, that come with the queen's paltry shilling. Although there has been no haemorrhaging of special force (SF) fighters to the private sector, there has been enough of a trickle to cause official unease. A memo recently circulated in the Ministry of Defence detailed the loss of 24 SF senior non-commissioned officers to private companies in the past year. All had completed 22 years of service, and so were eligible for a full pension, and near the end of their careers. Yet there is now a shortage of hard-bitten veterans to fill training and other jobs earmarked for them, under a system for retaining them known as "continuance." America has responded to the problem by throwing cash at it, offering incentives of up to $150 000 to sign new contracts. The Ministry of Defence has found a cheaper ploy. It has spread the story of two British PMC employees, recently killed in Iraq, whose bodies were left rotting in the sun;

单选题Are teens and young adults more narcissistic (自恋的) today than in the past? That's the view of a California researcher who studies (1) people. In her new book, The Narcissism (2) : Living in the Age of Entitlement, psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and (3) W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia say research shows (4) young people today have "narcissistic traits" than in (5) generations. Such traits, Twenge says, include a very. (6) and inflated sense of self, which is (7) by a preoccupation with MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. "We've been on this self-admiration cultural (8) for a long time," Twenge says. (9) Twenge's take on today's young people isn't universal. Studies by other researchers, including Canadian (10) Dr. Kali of the University of Western Ontario, have used the same data but found (11) results. "They put a different (12) on it," Kali says. Twenge's studies have found more narcissistic traits and a (13) rate of increase among college students today, but Kali found that students' narcissism was (14) greater in 2006 than in 1976. Twenge's most recent paper studied the same data as Kali--more than 20 000 college students from 2002 to 2007. (15) researchers used the Narcissistic Personality Inventory to measure narcissistic (16) and findings by both have been (17) in peerreviewed journals. Twenge's book (18) just a month after The Mirror Effect : How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America, a book co-written by behavioral (19) Drew Pinsky, (20) suggested that a celebrity-obsessed culture is causing more narcissism.

单选题Ask just about any high school senior or junior in America—or their parents—and they"ll tell you that getting into a selective college is harder than it used to be. They"re right about that. But the reasons for the newfound difficulty are not well understood. Population growth plays a role, but the number of teenagers is not too much higher than it was 30 years ago, when the youngest baby boomers were still applying to college. And while many more Americans attend college than in the past, most of the growth has occurred at colleges with relatively few resources and high dropout rates, which bear little resemblance to the elites. So what else is going on? One overlooked factor is that top colleges are admitting fewer American students than they did a generation ago. Colleges have globalized over that time, deliberately increasing the share of their student bodies that come from overseas and leaving fewer slots for applicants from the United States. For American teenagers, it really is harder to get into Harvard—or Yale, Stanford, Brown, Boston College or many other elite colleges—than it was when today"s 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds were applying. The number of spots filled by American students at Harvard, after adjusting for the size of the teenage population nationwide, has dropped 27 percent since 1994. At Yale and Dartmouth, the decline has been 24 percent. At Carleton, it"s 22 percent. At Notre Dame and Princeton, it is 14 percent. This globalization obviously brings some big benefits. It has exposed American students to perspectives that our proudly parochial country often does not provide in childhood. Yet the way in which American colleges have globalized comes with costs, too. For one thing, the rise in foreign students has complicated the colleges" stated efforts to make their classes more economically diverse. Foreign students often receive insufficient financial aid and tend to be from well-off families. For another thing, the country"s most selective colleges have effectively shrunk as far as American students are concerned, during the same span that many students and their parents are spending more time obsessing over getting into one. Either way, the research emphasizes a problem with the way colleges have globalized. With only a handful of exceptions (including Harvard, Amherst, M.I.T. and Yale), colleges have not tried hard to recruit an economically diverse group of foreign students. The students instead have become a revenue source.

单选题In the idealized version of how science is done, facts about the world are waiting to be observed and collected by objective researchers who use the scientific method to carry out their work. But in the everyday practice of science, discovery frequently follows an ambiguous and complicated route. We aim to be objective, but we cannot escape the context of our unique life experiences. Prior knowledge and interest influence what we experience, what we think our experiences mean, and the subsequent actions we take. Opportunities for misinterpretation, error, and self-deception abound. Consequently, discovery claims should be thought of as protoscience. Similar to newly staked mining claims, they are full of potential. But it takes collective scrutiny and acceptance to transform a discovery claim into a mature discovery. This is the credibility process, through which the individual researcher"s me, here, now becomes the community"s anyone, anywhere, anytime. Objective knowledge is the goal, not the starting point. Once a discovery claim becomes public, the discoverer receives intellectual credit. But, unlike with mining claims, the community takes control of what happens next. Within the complex social structure of the scientific community, researchers make discoveries; editors and reviewers act as gatekeepers by controlling the publication process; other scientists use the new finding to suit their own purposes; and finally, the public (including other scientists) receives the new discovery and possibly accompanying technology. As a discovery claim works its way through the community, the interaction and confrontation between shared and competing beliefs about the science and the technology involved transforms an individual"s discovery claim into the community"s credible discovery. Two paradoxes exist throughout this credibility process. First, scientific work tends to focus on some aspect of prevailing knowledge that is viewed as incomplete or incorrect. Little reward accompanies duplication and confirmation of what is already known and believed. The goal is new-search, not re-search. Not surprisingly, newly published discovery claims and credible discoveries that appear to be important and convincing will always be open to challenge and potential modification or refutation by future researchers. Second, novelty itself frequently provokes disbelief. Nobel Laureate and physiologist Albert Szent-Gy ? rgyi once described discovery as "seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." But thinking what nobody else has thought and telling others what they have missed may not change their views. Sometimes years are required for truly novel discovery claims to be accepted and appreciated. In the end, credibility "happens" to a discovery claim—a process that corresponds to what philosopher Annette Baier has described as the commons of the mind. "We reason together, challenge, revise, and complete each other"s reasoning and each other"s conceptions of reason."

单选题It is easy to see why forgiveness is typically regarded as a virtue. Forgiveness is not always a virtue, however. Indeed, if I am correct in linking resentment to self-respect, a too ready tendency to forgive may properly be regarded as a vice because it may be a sign that one lacks respect for oneself. Forgiveness may indeed restore relationships, but to seek restoration at all cost--even at the cost of one's very human dignity--can hardly be a virtue. And, in intimate relationships, it can hardly be true love or friendship either the kind of love and friendship that Aristotle claimed is an essential art of the human life. If I count morality as much as anyone else (as surely I do), a failure to resent moral injuries done to me is a failure to care about the moral value in my own person (that I am, in Kantian language, an end in myself) and thus a failure to care about the very rules of morality. To put the point in yet another way: If it is proper to feel indignation when I see third parties morally wronged, must it not be equally proper to feel resentment when I experience the wrong done to myself? Morality is not simply something to be believed: it is something to be cared about. This caring includes concern about those persons (including oneself) who are the proper objects of moral attention. Interestingly enough, a readiness to forgive--or even a refusal to display resentment initially--may reveal a lack of respect not just for oneself by for others as well. The Nietzschean view, for example, is sometimes portrayed like this: There is no need for forgiveness because a strong person will never feel resentment in the first place. Why? Because he is not so weak as to think that other people--even those who harm him--matter enough to have any impact on his self-respect. We do not resent the insect that stings us (we simply deal with it), and neither should we resent the human who wrongs us. Although there is something attractive and worth discussing about this view, most of us would probably want to reject it as too demeaning of other human beings and our moral relations with them. I shall thus for the present assume the following: that forgiveness is acceptable only in cases where it is consistent with self-respect, respect for others as responsible moral agents, and allegiance to the rules of morality, that is, forgiveness must not involve complicity or acquiescence (默认) in wrongdoings.

单选题The author's presentation of Atlantans' car-dependence is meant