单选题The authors main purpose in writing this article is______

单选题Which of the following is NOT considered a result of the "Space Race"?

单选题 As college seniors hurtle into the job hunt, little lies on the resume-for example, claiming a degree when they're three credits shy of graduation-seem harmless enough. So new grads ought to read this memo now: those 20-year-old falsehoods on cream-colored, 32-1b. premium paper have ruined so many highprofile executives that you wonder who in the business world hasn't got the message. A resume listing two fabricated degrees led to the resignation of David Edmondson, CEO of RadioShack, in February. Untruthful resume have also hindered the careers of executives at the U.S. Olympic Committee. The headlines haven't dented job seekers' desire to dissemble even as employers have grown increasingly able to detect deception. InfoLink Screening Services, a background-checking company, estimates that 14% of job applicants in the U.S. lie about their education on their resumes. Employees who lie to get in the door can cause untold damage on a business, experts say, from staining the reputation and credibility of a firm to upending co-workers and projects to igniting shareholder wrath-and that's if the lie is found out. Even when it isn't, the falsified resume can indicate a deeply rooted inclination toward unethical behavior. "There's a lot of evidence that those who cheat on job applications also cheat in school and in life," says Richard Grfffith, director of the industrial and organizational psychology program at the Florida Institute of Technology. "If someone says they have a degree and they don't, I'd have little faith that person would tell the truth when it came to financial statements and so on." Employers' fears have sparked a boom in the background-screening industry. But guarding the henhouse does little good if the fox is already nestled inside. To unmask the deceivers among them, some employers are conducting checks upon promotion. Verified Person markets its ability to provide ongoing employee screening through automated criminal checks. With this increased alertness comes a thorny new dilemma: figuring out whether every lie is really a fireable offense. Many bosses feel that a worker's track record on the job speaks more strongly than a stretched resume, says John Challenger of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Rather than booting talented workers, Challenger suggests, employers should offer a pardon period. "A moratorium would let anyone who needs to come clean," he says And the culprit could always go back to school and finish that degree-maybe even on company time.

单选题With a series of well-timed deals, private-equity firms are giving traditional media- managers cause to be envious. The Warner Music transaction, in which Edgar Bronfman junior and three private-equity firms paid Time Warner $ 2.6 billion for the unit in 2003, is already judged a financial triumph for the buyers. Their success is likely to draw still more private-equity into the industry. And the investments are likely to get bigger: individual private-equity funds are growing--a $10 billion fund is likely this year--so even the biggest media firms could come within range, especially if private-equity investors club together. Some private-equity firms have long put money in media assets, but mostly reliable, relatively obscure businesses with stable cash flows. Now, some of them are placing big strategic bets on the more volatile bits, such as music and movies. And they are currently far more confident than the media old guard that the advertising cycle is about to turn sharply upwards. One reason why private-equity is making its presence felt in media is that it has a lot of money to invest. Other industries are feeling its weight too. But private-equity's buying spree (狂购乱买) reveals a lot about the media business in particular. Media conglomerates( 联合公司) lack the confidence to make big acquisitions, after the last wave of deals went wrong. Executives at Time Warner, for instance, which disastrously merged with AOL in 2000, wanted to buy MGM, a movie studio, but the board (it is said) were too nervous. Instead, private- equity firms combined with Sony, a consumer-electronics giant, to buy MGM late last year. Private-equity's interest also reflects the fact that revenue growth in media businesses such as broadcast TV and radio is now hard to come by. The average annual growth rate for 12 categories of established American media businesses in 1998-2003, excluding the internet, was just 3.4% , says Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment bank. Private-equity puts a higher value on low-growth, high cashflow assets than the public stockmarket, says Jonathan Nelson, founder of Providence Equity Partners, a media-focused private-equity firm. What private-equity men now bring to the media business, they like to think, is financial discipline plus an enthusiastic attitude towards new technology. Old-style media managers, claim the newcomers, are still in denial about how technology is transforming their industry. Traditional media managers grudgingly agree that, so far, private-equity investors are doing very nicely indeed from their entertainment deals. The buyers of Warner Music have already got back most of their $ 2.6 billion from the firm by cutting costs, issuing debt and making special payouts to shareholders. This year, its investors are expected to launch an initial public offering, which could bring them hundreds of millions more.

单选题With the spread of inter-active electronic media a man alone in his own home will never have been so well placed to fill the inexplicable mental space between cradle and crematorium. So I suspect that books will be pushed more and more into those moments of travel or difficult defecation (1) people still don't quite know what to do with. When people do read, I think they'll want to feel they are reading literature, or (2) something serious. (3) you're going to find fewer books presenting themselves as no-nonsense and (4) assuming literary pretensions and being packaged as works of art. We can expect an extraordinary variety of genre, but with an underlying (5) of sentiment and vision. Translators can only (6) from this desire for the presumably sophisticated. We can look forward to lots of difficult names and fantastic stories of foreign parts enthusiastically (7) by the overall worship of the "global village'. Much of this will be awful and some wonderful, (8) don't expect the press or the organizers of prizes to offer you much help in making the appropriate distinctions. They will be chiefly (9) in creating celebrity, the greatest enemy of discrimination, but a good prop for the (10) consumer. Every ethnic grouping over the world will have to be seen to have a great writer—a phenomenon that will (11) a new kind of provincialism, more chronological than geographic, (12) only the strictly contemporary is talked about and (13) Universities, including Cambridge, will include (14) their literature syllabus novels, written only last year. (15) occasional exhumation for the Nobel, the achievements of ten or only five years ago will be largely forgotten. In short, you can't go too far wrong when predicting more of the same. But there is a (16) side to this—the inevitable reaction against it. The practical things I would like to see happen--publishers seeking less to (17) celebrity through extravagant advertising, (18) and magazines (19) space to reflective pieces—are rather more improbable than the Second Coming(耶稣复临). But dullness never quite darkens the whole planet. In their own idiosyncratic fashion a few writers will (20) be looking for new departures.

单选题According to the passage, one cause for the difficulties of American higher education is that_____

单选题Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb.12, 1809. How"s this for a coincidence? Instinctively, we want to say that they belong together. It"s not just because they were both great men, and not because they happen to be exactly at the same age. Rather, it"s because the scientist and the politician each touched off a revolution that changed the world. Lincoln and Darwin were both revolutionaries, in the sense that both men upended realities that prevailed when they were born. They seem—and sound—modern to us, because the world they left behind them is more or less the one we still live in. So, considering the joint magnitude of their contributions—and the coincidence of their conjoined birthdays—it is hard not to wonder: who was the greater man? It"s an apples and oranges—or Superman vs. Santa—comparison. But if you limit the question to influence, it bears pondering, all the more if you turn the question around and ask, what might have happened if one of these men had not been born? Very quickly the balance tips in Lincoln"s favor. Great as Darwin"s book on evolution is, it does no harm to remember that be hurried to publish "The Origin of Species" because he thought he was about to be scooped(抢先)by his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently come up with much the same idea of evolution through natural selection. In other words, there was a certain inevitability to Darwin"s theory. Ideas about evolution surfaced throughout the first part of the 19th century, and while none of them was as conclusive as Darwin"s, it was not as though he was the only man who had the idea. Lincoln, in contrast, is Unique. Take him out of the picture, and there is no telling what might have happened to the country. True, his election to the presidency did provoke secession and, in turn, the war itself, but that war seems inevitable—not a question of if but when. If Darwin were not so irreplaceable as Lincoln, that should not deny his accomplishment. No one could have formulated his theory any more elegantly—or anguished more over its implications. Like Lincoln, Darwin was brave. He risked his health and his reputation to advance the idea that we are not over nature but a part of it. Lincoln prosecuted a war—and became its ultimate casualty—to ensure that no man should have dominion over another. Their identical birthdays afford us a superb opportunity to observe these men in the shared context of their time—how each was shaped by his circumstances, how each reacted to the beliefs that steered the world into which he was born and ultimately how each reshaped his comer of that world and left it irrevocably changed.

单选题It seems that_____ is the musical instrument used throughout the history of blues.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Here in the U. S. a project of moving the government a few hundred miles to the southwest proceeds apace, under the supervision of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Apart from the usual highways and parks, Byrd has taken a special interest in transplanting pieces of federal agencies from metropolitan Washington to his home state. Strangely, Byrd's little experiment in de-Washingtonization has become the focus of outrage among the very people who are otherwise most Critical of Washington and its ways. To these critics, it is the very symbol of congressional arrogance of power, isolation from reality, contempt for the voters, and so on, and demonstrates the need for term limits if not lynching. Consider the good-government advantages of (let's call it) the Byrd Migration. What better way to symbolize an end to the old ways and commitment to reform than physically moving the government? What better way to break up old bureaucracies than to uproot and transplant them, files and all? Second, spreading the government around a bit ought to reduce that self-feeding and self- regarding Beltway culture that Washington-phobes claim to dislike so much. Of course there is a good deal of hypocrisy in this anti Washington chatter. Much of it comes from politicians and journalists who have spent most of their adult lives in Washington and wouldn't care to live anywhere else. They are not rushing to West Virginia themselves, except for the occasional quaint rustic weekend. But they can take comfort that public servants at the Bureau of the Public Debt, at least, have escaped the perils of inside-the-Beltway insularity. Third, is Senator Byrd's raw spread-the-wealth philosophy completely illegitimate? The Federal Government and government-related private enterprises have made metropolitan Washington one of the richest areas of the country. By contrast, West Virginia is the second poorest state, after Mississippi. The entire country's taxes support the government. Why shouldn't more of the country get a piece of it? As private businesses are discovering, the electronic revolution is making it less and less necessary for work to be centralized at headquarters. There's no reason the government shouldn't take more advantage of this trend as well. It is hardly enough, though, to expel a few thousand midlevel bureaucrats from {{U}}the alleged{{/U}} Eden inside the Washington Beltway. Really purging the Washington culture enough to satisfy its noisiest critics will require {{U}}a mass exodus{{/U}} on the order of what the Khmer Rouge instituted when they took over Phnom Penh in 1975. Until the very members of the TIME Washington bureau itself are traipsing south along I-95, their word processors strapped to their backs, the nation cannot rest easy. But America's would-be Khmer Rouge should give Senator Byrd more credit for showing the way.

单选题The author mentions the example of SBC to demonstrate that ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} For Tony Blair, home is a messy sort of place, where the prime minister's job is not to uphold eternal values but to force through some unpopular changes that may make the country work a bit better. The area where this is most obvious, and where it matters most, is the public services. Mr Blair faces a difficulty here which is partly of his own making. By focusing his last election campaign on the need to improve hospitals, schools, transport and policing, he built up expectations. Mr Blair has said many times that reforms in the way the public services work need to go alongside increases in cash. Mr Blair has made his task harder by committing {{U}}a classic negotiating error.{{/U}} Instead of extracting concessions from the other side before promising his own, he has pledged himself to higher spending on public services without getting a commitment to change from the unions. Why, given that this pledge has been made, should the health unions give ground in return? In a speech on March 20th, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, said that "the something-for-nothing days are over in our public services and there can be no blank cheques." But the government already seems to have given health workers a blank cheque. Nor are other ministries conveying quite the same message as the treasury. On March 19th, John Hutton, a health minister, announced that cleaners and catering staff in new privately-funded hospitals working for the National Health service will still be government employees, entitled to the same pay and conditions as other health-service workers. Since one of the main ways in which the government hopes to reform the public sector is by using private providers, and since one of the main ways in which private providers are likely to be able to save money is by cutting labor costs, this move seems to undermine the government's strategy. Now the government faces its hardest fight. The police need reforming more than any other public service. Half of them, for instance, retire early, at a cost of ￡1 billion (＄1.4% billion) a year to the taxpayer. The police have voted 10--1 against proposals from the home secretary, David Blunkett, to reform their working practices. This is a fight the government has to win. If the police get away with it, other public-service workers will reckon they can too. And, if they all get away it, Mr Blair's domestic policy--which is what voters are most likely to judge him on a the next election--will be a failure.

单选题From the last paragraph we can conclude that