单选题What took place in literacy just before the Renaissance?______

单选题The author is of the opinion that Keneally's perspectives are

单选题The day was star-crossed: Friday the 13th in the month of October, on the eve of the second looming anniversary of a devastating market crash. "I'm telling you, psychology is really funny. People get crazy in situations like that," said portfolio strategist Elaine Garzarelli. Last week Friday the 13th lived up to its frightful reputation. After drifting lower at a sleepy pace for most of the day, the Dow Jones industrial average abruptly lurched into a hair-raising sky dive in the final hour of trading. The Bush Administration moved swiftly to avert any sense of crisis after the market Closed. Declared Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady: "It's important to recognize that today's stock market decline doesn't signal any fundamental change in the condition of the economy. The economy remains well balanced, and the outlook is for continued moderate growth." But Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey, who chairs a House subcommittee on telecommunications and finance, vowed to hold hearings this week on the stock market slide. Said he: "This is the second heart attack. My hope is that before we have the inevitable third heart attack, we pay attention to these problems." Experts found no shortage of culprits to blame for the latest shipwreck. A series of downbeat realizations converged on Friday, ranging from signs of a new burst of inflation to sagging corporate profits to troubles in the junk-bond market that has fueled major takeovers. The singular event that shook investors was the faltering of a ＄6.75 billion labor management buyout of UAL, the parent company of United Airlines, the second largest U.S. carrier. On one point most thoughtful Wall Streeters agreed: the market had reached such dizzying heights that a correction of some sort seemed almost inevitable. Propelled by favorable economic news and a wave of multibillion-dollar takeovers, stocks had soared more than 1,000 points since the 1987 crash. But by last August some Wall streeters were clearly worried. The heaviest blow to the market came Friday afternoon. In a three-paragraph statement, UAL said a labor-management group headed by Chairman Stephen Wolf had failed to get enough financing to acquire United. Several banks had apparently balked at the deal, which was to be partly financed through junk bonds. The take-over group said it would submit a revised bid "in the near term," but the announcement stunned investors who had come to view the United deal as the latest sure thing in the 1980s buyout binge. Said John Downey, a trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange: "The airline stocks have looked like attractive takeover targets. But with the United deal in trouble, everyone started to wonder what other deals might not go through. /

单选题According to the passage, work-life balance schemes

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A: B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. What would you do with $590m? This is now a(n) {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}for Gloria MacKenzie, an 84-year-old widow who recently {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}from her small, tin-roofed house in Florida to collect the biggest lottery in history. The blogosphere (the world of weblogs) is full of {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}for this lucky pensioner. But if she hopes her new-found money will {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}lasting feelings of fulfillment, she could do. {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}than read "Happy Money" by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton. These two {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}—she teaches psychology at the University of British Columbia; he {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}on marketing at Harvard Business School-use an array of behavioral research to show that the most {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}ways to spend money can be counterintuitive. Fantasies of great wealth often involve {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}of fancy cars and palatial homes on remote seashores. {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}satisfaction with these material purchases {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}fairly quickly. What was {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}exciting and new becomes old-hat; remorse {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}in. It is far better to spend money on experiences, say Ms. Dunn and Mr. Norton, like interesting trips, {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}meals or even going to the cinema. These purchases often become more valuable with time—{{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}stories or memories—particularly if they involve feeling more {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}to others. Readers of "Happy Money" are clearly a {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}lot, anxious about fulfillment, not hunger. Money may not quite buy happiness, but people in wealthier countries are generally happier than those in poor ones. Yet the {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}between feeling good and spending money on others can be seen among rich and poor people around the world, and {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}enhances the pleasure of most things for most people. Not everyone will agree with the authors' ideas, but most people will come {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}from this book believing it was money well spent.

单选题The writer mentioned the case of "the hunter who shares his spoils with others" to demonstrate ______.

单选题Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy , radiation , or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him. It"s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don"t die like the rest of us. What"s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. Of course, doctors don"t want to die ; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call "futile care" being performed on people. That"s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, "Promise me if you find me like this that you" ll kill me. " How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn"t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system. To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. When doctors ask if they want "everything" done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. For example, many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. But of course it"s not just patients making these things happen. Doctors play an enabling role, too. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment . It"s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litgation and do whatever they"re asked to avoid getting in trouble.

单选题Why is it impossible for people to build a remarkable new civilization today?

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} It has long been the subject of speculation among the police and criminologists: what would happen if all the officers who now spend so much of their time taking statements, profiling criminals and moving pieces of paper around were suddenly put on the streets? Crime figures released by London's Metropolitan Police this week provide the best answer yet. Following the bombings of July 7th and 21st, thousands of police officers materialised on London's pavements, many of them sporting brightly coloured jackets. Drawn from all over the city, they were assigned to guard potential targets such as railway stations. The police presence was especially heavy in the bombed boroughs: Camden (which was struck three times), Hammersnrith and Fulham, Lamheth, Tower Hamlets, Westminster and the City of London. The show of force did not just scare off terrorists. There was less crime in July than in May or June, which As unusual: the warmer month tends to bring out criminal tendencies, as windows are left open and alcohol is imbibed alfresco. But the chilling effect was much stronger in the six boroughs that were targeted by terrorists. There, overall crime was down by 12% compared with July 2004. In inner London as a whole, crime fell by 6%. But in outer London, where the blue line was thinner, it went up slightly. Simon Foy, who tracks such trends at the Metropolitan Police, says that crime fell particularly steeply on the days of the attacks, partly because of the overwhelming police presence and partly because "even criminals were watching their televisions". What is significant is that crime barely rose thereafter. That was a change from the aftermath of September 11th 2001, when crime quickly soared just about everywhere—possibly because officers were deployed only in the very centre of London. "The received wisdom among criminologists is that marginal changes in visible patrolling have little or no effect on crime," says Mike Hough, a criminologist at King's College London. July's experiment should put that argument to rest. Even if offenders do not make rational calculations about the odds of being caught—which was low both before and after the bombings--they will Be moved by a display of overwhelming force.

单选题According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. According to Alexa, the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 5th. Quantcast ranks the website 15th in U.S. in terms of traffic, and Compete. com ranks it 14th in U.S. The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances. But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months. And now, Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as "they" or "themself." "We've gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles," Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit said in a company statement. In English, when users fail to specify what gender they are, Facebook defaults to some form of the gender neutral, plural pronoun "they." That option is unavailable when the plural is always masculine or feminine in other languages. "People who haven't selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex," Gleit wrote. Unless the gender of the user is clear, Facebook does not know which pronoun to use to notify other members add information to the site. This common English problem is multiplied in languages where masculine and feminine distinctions are grammatically ingrained. The site will now ask users to specify whether they are male or female on their basic member- ship profile. It will prompt existing users to define themselves. Facebook has an opt-out option for members who choose not to specify their gender or do not consider gender to be clear cut. Members can remove mention of gender from messages about their activities. "We've received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting," Gleit said.

单选题 {{U}}It's the part of the job that stock analyst Hiroshi Naya dislikes the most: phoning investor managers on a Saturday or Sunday when he's working on a report and facing a deadline.{{/U}} In Japan, placing a work call to someone on the weekend "feels like entering someone's house with your shoes on, " says Naya, chief analyst at Ichiyoshi Research Institute in Tokyo. So last year, Naya started asking his questions via messages on Facebook. While a telephone call seems intrusive, he says, a Facebook message "feels more relaxed. " Many Japanese have become fans of Mark Zuckerberg's company in the past year. It's taken a while: Even as Facebook took off in India, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia, it's been a laggard in Japan since its local-language version debuted in 2008. {{U}}The site faced cultural obstacles in a country where people historically haven't been comfortable sharing personal information, or even their names, on the Internet.{{/U}} Homegrown rivals such as community website operator Mixi and online game portals such as DeNA allow their users to adopt pseudonyms. The Japanese are overcoming their shyness, though. In February, Facebook had 13.5 million unique users, up from 6 million a year earlier. That puts Facebook in the No. 1 position in Japan for the first time, ahead of Twitter and onetime leader Mixi. "Facebook didn't have a lot of traction in Japan for the longest time, " says Arvind Rajan, Asia-Pacific managing director for Linkedln, which entered the Japanese market last October and hopes to emulate Face book's recent success. " They really did turn the corner, " he says. Rajan attributes the change in attitude to the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. During the crisis and its aftermath, sites such as Facebook helped parents and children locate each other and allowed people post and find reliable information. " The real-name case has been answered, " says Rajan. "People are getting it now. " Japanese see Facebook as a powerful business tool. The real-name policy makes the site a good place to cultivate relationships with would-be partners. As more companies such as retailers Uniqlo and Muji turn to Facebook to reach Japanese consumers, the Silicon Valley company is benefiting from a viruous cycle, says Koki Shiraishi, an analyst in Tokyo with Daiwa Securities Capital Markets. "{{U}}It's a chicken-and-egg thing{{/U}}: If everyone starts using it, then more people start using it. " As a result of Facebook's rise, investors have soured on some of its rivals : DeNA's stock price has dropped 24 percent in the past year, and Mixi's has fallen 38 percent. Growth at Twitter—which also entered Japan in 2008—has stagnated, and the San Francisco company has partnered with Mixi to do joint marketing. Twitter Japan country manager James Kondo says there's no reason to worry. Japan's social networking scene "is a developing thing, " he says. "We're not in a flat market where everyone is competing for a share of a fixed pie. "

单选题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{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The moon appears to warp the minds of some men. Despite putting men on the moon in 1969 America seems determined on re-enacting the space race, this time pitting its efforts against those of the Chinese. Now a Russian company claims it could develop a system to exploit the moon's natural resources and potentially relocate harmful industries there. This is {{U}}lunacy{{/U}}. Russia certainly has great prowess in space. In its former guise as the centre of power in the Soviet Union it launched the first man-made satellite in 1957. In a spectacular follow up, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in 1961. Another triumph came in 1968 when the Russians sent a spaceship to orbit the moon with turtles aboard, returning it and its living cargo safely to Earth. An unmanned Russian spacecraft also landed on the moon ahead of the first manned landing by the Americans. Even after Neil Armstrong took his one small step, Russia has proved its superiority in keeping people in space stations orbiting the Earth. The Russian Soyuz rocket is a mainstay of satellite launches and would be used to rescue astronauts should any accident befall the International Space Station. Head of the spacecraft manufacturer that helped achieve these Russian successes, this week boasted that his rockets could be used to industrialise the moon. So why were his remarks greeted with such scepticism? One reason for the cynicism is that the idea is absurd. A United Nations treaty passed in 1967 bans potentially harmful interference with the Earth's original satellite and requires international consultation before proceeding with any activity that could disrupt the peaceful exploration of space, including the moon. A second problem is that landing on the moon has proved beyond the budget of any state other than America and of any private company to date. In fact one of the best hopes for investment comes from space tourism. On Saturday April 7th, the fifth such holidaymaker entered space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Charles Simonyi, an American software developer, paid $25m for his ten-day stay at the International Space Station. The next holiday destination is the moon. The tour operator that organised the first five packages is offering two tickets to orbit the moon for $100m each. Launch would be aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. But the Soyuz system was designed in the 1960s and has been on the verge of retirement for many years. Unfortunately the Russian authorities have postponed indefinitely the development of a successor. Thus the claim of the industrialisation of the moon is unlikely to succeed.