单选题THE ivory-billed woodpecker is not large, as birds go: It is about the size of a crow, but flashier, its claim to fame is that, though it had been thought extinct since 1944, a lone kayaker spotted it about two years ago, flying around among the cypress trees in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. And that sighting may prove the death-blow to a $319m irrigation project in the Arkansas corner of the Delta. The Grand Prairie Area Demonstration Project seemed, at first, a fine idea. The Grand Prairie is the fourth-largest rice-bowl in the world, with 363 000 acres under paddies. But it is running out of water, with farmers driving wells deeper and deeper into the underlying aquifer. The new project, dreamed up around a decade ago, would tap excess water from the White river when it floods and pumps it, at the rate of about one billion gallons a day, to storage tanks on around 1000 rice farms. Unfortunately, it would also divert water from the region's huge, swampy wildlife refuges, home to black bears and alligators and the pallid sturgeon. Tiny swamp towns like Clarendon and Brinkley, which are heavily black and almost destitute, rely on nature tourism for the little economic activity they have. In Brinkley, the barber offers an "ivorybill" haircut that makes you look like one. The project has some powerful local backers. They include Blanche Lincoln, the state's senior senator, who grew up on a rice farm in Helena, and Dale Bumpers, a former four-term senator and governor of Arkansas. Mr. Bumpers, long an icon of the environmental movement and prominent in the efforts to establish the refuges, now believes the water project is important for national security in food and trade, and that it will not damage the forests he has worked to protect. Opponents worry that the project, apart from its environmental risks, will overwhelm the innovative water conservation methods that rice-farmers are already using, and give the biggest water users an unfair advantage. They also object that it means using subsidised pumps to provide subsidised water for a crop that doesn't pay. Rice is one of the most heavily assisted crops in America; rice payments cost taxpayers almost $10 billion between 1995 and 2004, and rich farmers round Stuttgart in Arkansas County (an efficient and politically shrewd group) took in $21.2m in subsidies in 2004 alone.

单选题 The Newhouse shelter in Kansas City has helped thousands of abused women and their children over the past 37 years. But last month, the women were forced to move out and the staff started looking for new jobs. The reason was simple. While the need was there, the money was not. {{U}}Dwindling{{/U}} charitable contributions tied to a broad U.S. economic slowdown mean fewer resources and hard choices for charities across the country. "People are holding tight to their money," said Newhouse President Leslie Caplan, who estimated charitable contributions were down ＄200,000 this year compared to last year. That, combined with cuts in government grants, has severely squeezed the center's ＄1.3 million budget. As Americans struggling with rising unemployment and home foreclosures turn to charities for help, charities themselves are running into financial difficulties as donations dwindle. They are being forced to increase their outreach, hold more fund-raising events and seek out new donors to make ends meet. "The people who used to give us small amounts, $10 or $15, that is going away. The people who have a lot of money still are able to give, but they are more selective in their giving," McIntyre said. "It's getting bad out there. " Philanthropic Giving Index, which measures prospects for charitable donations, has dropped to 83 on a scale of 100 from 88 in December 2007, its lowest point since 2003. Rev. Cecil Williams noticed that donations to Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco began falling off earlier this year, forcing him to cut meals, child care, and health care to the poor by up to 15 percent. Meanwhile, the lines for help grow longer. Melissa Perez of La Habra, California, hosted a Brazilian student last year under the auspices of the Center for Cultural Interchange, a Chicago-based nonprofit that arranges for families to house and feed foreign students. "Everything's hard. We're very much pinched," said Perez, who cannot afford to do it again this year because her family's manufacturing business is in trouble. Such experiences mean the Center for Cultural Interchange has not been able to find enough volunteers. "Business is not as good and they feel the pressure and that leads to a decline in giving," said Bridges board member Inayat Malik. "How much people give depends on' how secure they feel," Berman said. "I think we'll see an impact on personal giving this fall and winter, which is when most charitable organizations depend on generosity. "

单选题How many America's celebrity bosses are mentioned in the first paragraph?

单选题It is generally believed that the digital divide is something

单选题The National Association of Securities Dealers is investigating whether some brokerage houses are inappropriately pushing individuals to borrow large sums on their houses to invest in the stock market. Can we persuade the association to investigate would-be privatizers of Social Security? For it is now apparent that the administration"s privatization proposal will amount to the same thing: borrow trillions, put the money in the stock market and hope. Privatization would begin by diverting payroll taxes, which pay for current Social Security benefits, into personal investment accounts. The government would have to borrow to make up the shortfall. This would sharply increase the government"s debt. "Never mind," privatization advocates say, "in the long run, people would make so much on personal accounts that the government could save money by cutting retirees" benefits." Even so, if personal investment accounts were invested in Treasury bonds, this whole process would accomplish precisely nothing. The interest workers would receive on their accounts would exactly match the interest the government would have to pay on its additional debt. To compensate for the initial borrowing, the government would have to cut future benefits so much that workers would gain nothing at all. However, privatizers claim that these investments would make a lot of money and that, in effect, the government, not the workers, would reap most of those gains, because as personal accounts grew, the government could cut benefits. We can argue at length about whether the high stock returns such schemes assume are realistic (they aren"t), but let"s cut to the chase: in essence, such schemes involve having the government borrow heavily and put the money in the stock market. That"s because the government would, in effect, confiscate workers" gains in their personal accounts by cutting those workers" benefits. Once you realize what privatization really means, it doesn"t sound too responsible, does "it? But the details make it considerably worse. First, financial markets would, correctly, treat the reality of huge deficits today as a much more important indicator of the government"s fiscal health than the mere promise that government could save money by cutting benefits in the distant future. After all, a government bond is a legally binding promise to pay, while a benefits formula that supposedly cuts costs 40 years from now is nothing more than a suggestion to future Congresses. If a privatization plan passed in 2005 called for steep benefit cuts in 2045, what are the odds that those cuts would really happen? Second, a system of personal accounts would pay huge brokerage fees. Of course, from Wall Street"s point of view that"s a benefit, not a cost.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Joy William's quirky fourth novel The Quick and the Dead follows three 16-year-old misfits in an abnormal Charlie's Angels set in the American south-west. Driven unclearly to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond curse: they rescue a wounded ox and hurl stones at stuffed elephants. In what is structurally a road novel that ends up where it began, the threesome stumbles upon both cruelty to animals and unlikely romance. A mournful dog is killed by an angry neighbor, a taxidermist falls in love with an 8-year-old direct-action firebrand determined that he pays. for his sins. A careen across the barely tamed Arizona prairie, this peculiar book aims less for a traditional storyline than a sequence of noisy (often hilarious) conversations, ridiculous circumstances, and absurdist scene. The consequent long-walk-to-nowhere is both the book's limitation and its charm. All three girls are motherless. Fiercely political Alice discovers that her parents are her grandparents, who thereupon shrivel: "Lie had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into oldness." Both parents of the sorrowful Corvus drowned while driving on a flooded interstate off-ramp. The mother of the more conventional Annabel ("one of those people who would say, We'll get in touch soonest' when they never wanted to see you again") slammed her car drunkenly into a fish restaurant. Later, Annabel's father observes to his wife's ghost. "You didn't want to order what I ordered, darling." The sharp-tongued ghost snaps back: "That's because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake." Against a roundly apocalyptic world view. the great pleasures of this book are line-by-line. Ms. Williams can break setting and character alike in a few slashes: "it was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but courageous downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave." Alice's acerbity spits little wisdoms: putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is "a classic capitalistic consumer trick, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror' and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy." Whether or not the novel, like Alice. expressly advocates animal rights, an animal motif crops up in every scene, as flesh-and-blood "critters" (usually dead) or plain decoration on crockery. If Ms. Williams does not intend to induce human horror at a pending cruel Armageddon, she at least invokes a future of earthly loneliness, where animals appear only as ceramic-hen butter dishes and extinct-species Elastoplasts. One caution: when flimsy narrative superstructure begins to sag, anarchic wackiness can grow wearing. While The Quick and the Dead is sharp from its first page, the trouble with starting at the edge is there is nowhere to go. Nevertheless. Ms. Williams is original, energetic and viscously funny: Carl Hiaasen with a conscience.

单选题The word "lopsided" (Paragraph 4) most probably means ______.

单选题Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and. Strange things have been happening to England. Still{{U}} (1) {{/U}}from the dissolution of the empire in the years{{U}} (2) {{/U}}World War Ⅱ, now the English find they are not even British. As the cherished "United Kingdom" breaks into its{{U}} (3) {{/U}}parts, Scots are clearly{{U}} (4) {{/U}}and the Welsh, Welsh. But who exactly are the English? What's left of them, with everything but the {{U}}(5) {{/U}}half of their island taken away? Going back in time to{{U}} (6) {{/U}}roots doesn't help. First came the Celts, then the Romans, then Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes. Invasion after invasion, until the Norman Conquest. English national identity only seemed to find its{{U}} (7) {{/U}}later, on the shifting sands of expansionism, from Elizabethan times onwards. The empire seemed to seal it. But now there's just England, {{U}}(8) {{/U}}of a green island in the northern seas, lashed by rain, scarred by two{{U}} (9) {{/U}}of vicious industrialization fallen{{U}} (10) {{/U}}dereliction, ruined, as D．H. Lawrence thought, by "the tragedy of ugliness," its abominable architecture. Of all English institutions, the one to{{U}} (11) {{/U}}on would surely be the pub. Shelter to Chaucer's pilgrims, home to Falstaff and Hal, throne of felicity to Dr. Johnson, the pub- that smoky, yeasty den of jollity-is the womb of{{U}} (12) {{/U}}, if anywhere is. Yet in the midst of this national{{U}} (13) {{/U}}crisis, the pub, the mainstay of English life, a staff driven{{U}} (14) {{/U}}into the sump of history, {{U}}(15) {{/U}}as the Saxons, is suddenly dying and evolving at{{U}} (16) {{/U}}rates. Closing at something like a rate of more than three a day, pubs have become{{U}} (17) {{/U}}enough that for the first time since the Domesday Book, more than half the villages in England no longer have one. It's a rare pub that still{{U}} (18) {{/U}}, or even limps on, by being what it was {{U}}(19) {{/U}}to be: a drinking establishment. The old{{U}} (20) {{/U}}of a pub as a place for a "session," a lengthy, restful, increasingly tipsy evening of swigging, is all but defunct.

单选题Like the flu, a person's emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you'll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you'll tend to wall slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else's irrational thought processes. Anyone who's lost money on a house in need of repair may have succumbed to a classic economic fallacy known as "sunk costs." You make a bad investment in a home that's never going to sell for more than you put in to it, yet you want to justify your investment by continuing to throw money into renovations. One way to avoid this hole is to get advice from someone who has no self-interest in the project. But is the outsider still somehow susceptible to your mindset? To find out, social psychologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University and colleagues asked college students to take over decision-making for a person they had never met--and who they didn't know was fake. The volunteers were split into two groups: one that felt some connection with the decision-maker and another that didn't. In one experiment, the volunteers watched the following scenario play out via text on a computer screen: the fake decision-maker tried to outbid another person for a prize of 356 points, which equaled $4.45 in real money. The decision-maker started out with 360 points, and every time the other bidder raised the stakes by 40 points, the decision-maker followed suit. Volunteers were told that once the decision-maker bid over 356 points, he or she would begin to lose some of the $12 payment for participating in the study. When the decision-maker neared this threshold, the volunteers were asked to take over bidding. Objectively, the volunteers should have realized that--like the person who makes a bad investment in a house--the decisionmaker would keep throwing good money after bad. But the volunteers who felt identification with the fake player made almost 60% more bids and were more likely to lose money than those who didn't feel a connection. Galinsky believes that the results suggest that companies trying to reverse results of bad decisions should find true outsiders. He points to troubled automaker Ford as an example. Instead of hiring from within--as General Motors (GM) recently did--Ford made Alan Mulally from Boeing, an aerospace company, their chief execu- tive officer. Many experts believe that Ford is now recovering quicker than GM. "It's true that insiders have more knowledge," Galinsky says. "But when you are already down the road of a failed course of action, you really need.., a true outsider./

单选题What is one of the authors attitude towards industrialism?______

单选题It is suggested toward the end of the text that

单选题 About 40 percent of Americans think of themselves as shy, while only 20 percent say they have never suffered from shyness at some point in their lives. Shyness occurs when a person's apprehensions are so great that they {{U}}(1) {{/U}} his making an expected or desired social response. {{U}}(2) {{/U}} of shyness can be as minor as {{U}}(3) {{/U}} to make eye contact when speaking to someone, {{U}}(4) {{/U}} as major as avoiding conversations whenever possible. "Shy people tend to be too {{U}}(5) {{/U}} with themselves, "said Jonathan Cheek, a psychologist, who is one of those at the forefront of current research on the topic."{{U}} (6) {{/U}}, for a smooth conversation, you need to pay attention to the other person's cues {{U}}(7) {{/U}} he is saying and doing. But the shy person is full of {{U}}(8) {{/U}} about how he seems to the other person, and so he often {{U}}(9) {{/U}} cues he should pick up. The result is an awkward lag in the conversation. Shy people need to stop focusing on {{U}}(10) {{/U}} and switch their attention to the other person." {{U}} (11) {{/U}},shy people by and large have {{U}}(12) {{/U}} social abilities than they think they do. {{U}}(13) {{/U}} Dr. Cheek videotaped shy people talking to {{U}}(14) {{/U}},and then had raters (评估者) evaluate how socially skilled the people were, he found that, in the {{U}}(15) {{/U}} of other people, the shy group had few {{U}}(16) {{/U}} problems. But when he asked the shy people themselves {{U}}(17) {{/U}} they had done, they were unanimous in saying that they had been social flops(失败). "Shy people are their own {{U}}(18) {{/U}} critics, "Dr. Cheek said. {{U}}(19) {{/U}}, he added, shy people feel they are being judged more {{U}}(20) {{/U}} than they actually are, and overestimate how obvious their social anxiety is to others.

单选题Menorca or Majorca? It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is. Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the Internet. Instead of buying a ready-made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator's brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute. com for ￡ 577 million ($1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms. This has led some to sound the death knell for high-street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre-tax profit rise by 16% to ￡ 114 million ($195 million) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the Internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years. Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay. Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the Internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services. This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, too? The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference.

单选题According to the passage, women are usually good at ______.

单选题Business cards are likely to have appeared

单选题Climatic conditions are delicately adjusted to the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. If there were a change in the atmosphere--for example, in the relative proportions of atmospheric gases"-the climate would probably change also. A slight increase in water vapor, for instance, would increase the heat-retaining capacity of the atmosphere and would lead to a rise in global temperatures. In contrast, a large increase in water vapor would increase the thickness and extent of the cloud layer, reducing the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has an important effect on climatic change. Most of the Earth's incoming energy is short-wavelength radiation, which tends to pass through atmospheric carbon dioxide easily. The Earth, however, reradiates much of the received energy as long-wavelength radiation, which carbon dioxide absorbs and then remits toward the Earth. This phenomenon, known as the greenhouse effect, can result in an increase in the surface temperature of a planet. An extreme example of the effect is shown by Venus, a planet covered by heavy clouds composed mostly of carbon dioxide, whose surface temperatures have been measured at 43012. If the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is reduced, the temperature falls. According to one respectable theory, if the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration were halved, the Earth would become completely covered with ice. Another equally respectable theory, however, states that a halving of the carbon dioxide concentration would lead only to reduction in global temperatures of 312. If, because of an increase in forest fires or volcanic activity, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere increased, a warmer climate would be produced. Plant growth, which relies on both the warmth and the availability of carbon dioxide, would probably increase. As a consequence, plants would use more and more carbon dioxide. Eventually carbon dioxide levels would diminish and the climate, in turn, would become cooler. With reduced temperatures many plants would die; carbon dioxide would thereby be returned to the atmosphere and gradually the temperature would rise again. Thus, if this process occurred, there might be a long-term oscillation in the amount of carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere, with regular temperature increases and decreases of a set magnitude. Some climatologists argue that the burning of fossil fuels has raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and has caused a global temperature increase of at least 1 C. But a supposed global temperature rise of 112 may in reality be only several regional temperature increases, restricted to areas where there are many meteorological stations and mused simply by shifts in the pattern of atmospheric circulation. Other areas, for example, the Southern Hemisphere Oceanic Zone, may be experiencing an equivalent temperature decrease that is unrecognized because of the shortage of meteorological recording stations.