单选题In the end, a degree of sanity prevailed. The militant Hindus who had vowed to breach a police cordon and start the work of building a temple to the god Ram at the disputed site of Ayodhya decided to respect a Supreme Court decision barring them from the area. So charged have Hindu-Muslim relations in India become in recent weeks, as the declared deadline of March 15th neared, that a clash at Ram's supposed birthplace might well have provoked bloodshed on an appalling scale across the nation. It has, unfortunately, happened often enough before. But the threat has not vanished. The court's decision is only an interim one, and the main Hindu groups have not given up on their quest to build their temple. Extreme religious violence, which seemed in recent years to have faded after the Ayodhya-related explosion of 1992--1993, is again a feature of the political landscape. Though faults lie on both sides (it was a Muslim attack on Hindus in a train in Gujarat that started the recent slaughter), the great bulk of victims were, as always, Muslims. Once again, educated Hindus are.to be heard inveighing against the "appeasing" of Muslims through such concessions as separate constitutional status for Kashmir or the right to practice Islamic civil law. Once again, the police are being accused of doing little or nothing to help Muslim victims of rampaging Hindu mobs. Once again, India's 130m Muslims feel unequal and unsafe in their own country. Far too many Hindus would refuse to accept that it is “their own country" at all. The wonder of it, perhaps, is that things are not worse. While the world applauds Pakistan for at last locking up the leaders of its extreme religious groups, in India the zealots still support, sustain and to a degree constitute the government. The BJP, which leads the ruling coalition, was founded as a political front for the Hindu movement. It is simply one, and by no means the dominant, member of what is called the Sangh Pariwar, the "family of organizations". Other members of the family are much less savoury. There is the VHP, the World Hindu Organization, which led the movement to build the Ram temple. There is the Bajrang Dal, the brutalist "youth wing" of the VHP. There is substantial evidence that members of the VHP and the Bajrang Dal helped to organize the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat after 58 Hindus were killed on a train as they returned from Ayodhya.

单选题You slip the key into the ignition and crank the engine to life. But before you put the ear into gear, you tap a key on the keyboard mounted by the steering wheel, and your newest e-mail flashes up on the windscreen. This seductive satyr is what you get when you cross a ear and a eomputer. Dubbed the "network vehiele", or net-mobile, it may soon come to a driveway near you ( probably the one belonging to your rich neighbor). In a net-mobile, a motorist could tap into a regional road system but also to map out a route around rush-hour traffic snags. Drivers and passengers will be able to send and receive e-mail, track the latest sports scores or stock quotes, surf the Web, and even play video games. Or so, at least, say a number of computer-industry firms such as Microsoft, Sun, IBM and Netseape. The modern car is already an electronic showcase on wheels . On-board microcomputers improve fuel economy and reduce emissions. They operate anti-lock brake systems, and on some ears even regulate the firmness of the shock absorbers. But much of the technology needed to add extra is available now. A prototype network vehicle, produced by a consortium of Netseape, Sun, IBM and Delco (an automotive electronics firm based in Michigan), was introduced at the recent annual computer industry show in Las Vegas. It not only offered such desktop-eomputer-like services as e-mail, but allowed a driver to use them without looking away from the road. It was operated by voice commands and projected its data on to the windscreen, using the same sort of head-up display system found in modern fighter jets. Members of the consortium think a real-world network vehicle could be in production in as little as four years. Car-makers have already begun rolling out some of the features found on these prototype net mobiles. If the driver of a General Motors car equipped with its On-Star system locks his key in the car, for example, an emergency centre can transmit a digital signal to unlock the doors. On-star also calls automatically for help if an accident triggers the airbags. Toyota and General Motors are among a growing list of firms offering such in-ear navigation systems. And in Europe, BMW and Mercedes-Benz recently introduced navigation hardware that can not only plot out a route, but alert a driver to traffic jams.

单选题 Making good coffee is not a simple business. Coffee bushes must be grown in shade. A hillside is best--but it mustn't be too {{U}}(1) {{/U}}. After three years, the bushes will start to {{U}}(2) {{/U}} bright-red coffee "cherries", which are picked, processed to {{U}}(3) {{/U}} the inner part, and spread out to dry for days, {{U}}(4) {{/U}} on concrete. They are {{U}}(5) {{/U}} again to separate the bean, which needs to rest, preferably for a few months. Only then can it be roasted, ground and brewed {{U}}(6) {{/U}} the stuff that dreams are suppressed with. In Mexico and parts of Central America, {{U}}(7) {{/U}} in Colombia, most coffee farmers are smallholders. They found it especially hard to {{U}}(8) {{/U}} the recent fall in the coffee price. The {{U}}(9) {{/U}} of their income makes it hard for farmers to invest to {{U}}(10) {{/U}} their crop, says Fernando Celis. The fall forced many small farmers to {{U}}(11) {{/U}} other crops, or migrate to cities. For farmers, one way out of this {{U}}(12) {{/U}} is to separate the price they are paid {{U}}(13) {{/U}} the international commodities markets. This is the {{U}}(14) {{/U}} of Fair-trade, an organization which certifies products as "responsibly" sourced. Fair-trade determines at what price farmers make what it considers a {{U}}(15) {{/U}} profit. Its current {{U}}(16) {{/U}} is that the appropriate figure is 10% above the market price. {{U}} (17) {{/U}}, sales of Fair-trade-certified coffee have increased from $ 22. 5m per year to $ 87m per year since 1998. This is still a tiny fraction of the overall world coffee trade, worth $10 billion {{U}}(18) {{/U}} But there are plenty of other markets for high-quality coffee. Some small producers can {{U}}(19) {{/U}} more by marketing their coffee as organic or "bird-friendly" because, unlike large, mechanized plantations, they have {{U}}(20) {{/U}} shade trees.

单选题Many will know that the word "muscle" comes from the Latin for "mouse" (rippling under the skin, so to speak ). But what about "chagrin", derived from the Turkish for roughened leather, or scaly sharkskin. Or "lens" which comes from the Latin "lentil" or "window" meaning "eye of wind" in old Norse? Looked at closely, the language comes apart in images, like those strange paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo where heads are made of fruit and vegetables. Not that Henry Hitchings's book is about verbal surrealism. That is an extra pleasure in a book which is really about the way the English language has roamed the world helping itself liberally to words, absorbing them, forgetting where they came from, and moving on with an ever-growing load of exotics, crossbreeds and subtly shaded near-synonyms. It is also about migrations within the language's own borders, about upward and downward mobility, about words losing their roots, turning up in new surroundings, or lying in wait, like "duvet" which was mentioned by Samuel Johnson, for their moment. All this is another way of writing history. The Arab etymologies of " saffron ", "crimson" and "sugar" speak of England's medieval trade with the Arab world. We have "cheque" and "tariff" from this source too, plus "arithmetic" and "algorithm"-just as we have "etch" and "sketch" from the Dutch, musical terms from the Italians and philosophical ones from the Germans. French nuance and finesse are everywhere. At every stage, the book is about people and ideas on the move, about invasion, refugees, immigrants, traders, colonists and explorers. This is a huge subject and one that is almost bound to provoke question-marks and explosions in the margins-soon forgotten in the book's sheer sweep and scale. A balance between straight history and word history is sometimes difficult to strike, though. There is a feeling, occasionally, of being bundled too fast through complex linguistic developments and usages, or of being given interesting slices of history for the sake, after all, of not much more than a "gong" or a "moccasin". But it is churlish to carp. The author's zest and grasp are wonderful. He makes you want to check out everything-" carp" and "zest" included. Whatever is hybrid, fluid and unpoliced about English delights him. English has never had its Acad mie Francaise, but over the centuries it has not lacked furious defenders against foreign "corruption". There have been rearguard actions to preserve its "manly" pre-Norman origins, even to reconstruct it along Anglo-Saxon lines: "wheel- saddle" for bicycle, "painlore" for pathology. But the omnivorous beast is rampant still. More people speak it as their second language than as their first. Forget the language of Shakespeare. It's "Globish" now, the language of aspiration. No one owns it, a cause for despair to some. Mr. Hitchings admits to wincing occasionally, but almost on principle he is more cheerful than not.

单选题Euthanasia has been a topic of controversy in Europe since at least 1936. On an average of six times a day, a doctor in Holland practices "active" euthanasia: 1 administering a lethal drug to a 2 ill patient who has asked to be relieved 3 suffering. Twenty times a day, life prolonging treatment is withheld or withdrawn 4 there is no hope that it can 5 an ultimate cure. "Active" euthanasia remains a crime on the Dutch statute books, punishable 6 12 years in prison. But a series of court cases over the past 15 years has made it clear that a competent physician who 7 it out will not be prosecuted. Euthanasia, often called "mercy killing", is a crime everywhere in Western Europe. 8 more and more doctors and nurses in Britain, Germany, Holland and elsewhere readily 9 to practicing it, most often in the "passive" form of withholding or withdrawing 10 The long simmering euthanasia issue has lately 11 into a sometimes fierce public debate, 12 both sides claiming the mantle of ultimate righteousness. Those 13 to the practice see themselves 14 sacred principles of respect for life, 15 those in favor raise the banner of humane treatment. After years 16 the defensive, the advocates now seem to be 17 ground. Recent polls in Britain show that 72 percent of British 18 favor euthanasia in some circumstances. An astonishing 76 percent of 19 to a poll taken late last year in France said they would like the law changed to 20 mercy killings. Obviously, pressure groups favoring euthanasia and "assisted suicide" have grown steadily in Europe over the years.

单选题In the last paragraph, the author suggested that

单选题For the people who have never traveled across the Atlantic the voyage is a fantasy. But for the people who cross it frequently one crossing of the Atlantic is very much like another, and they do not make the voyage for the (1) of its interest. Most of us are quite happy when we feel (2) to go to bed and pleased when the journey (3) On the first night this time I felt especially lazy and went to bed (4) earlier than usual. When I (5) my cabin, I was surprised (6) that I was to have a companion during my trip, which made me feel a little unhappy. I had expected (7) but there was a suitcase (8) mine in the opposite corner. I wondered who he could be and what he would be like. Soon afterwards he came in. He was the sort of man you might meet (9) ，except that he was wearing (10) good clothes that I made up my mind that we would not (11) whoever he was and did not say (12) .As I had expected, he did not talk to me either but went to bed immediately. I suppose I slept for several hours because when I woke up it was already the middle of the night. I felt cold but covered (13) as well as I could and tries to go back to sleep. Then I realized that a (14) was coming from the window opposite. I thought perhaps I had forgotten (15) the door, so I got up (16) the door but found it already locked from the inside. The cold air was coming from the window opposite. I crossed the room and (17) the moon shone through it on to the other bed. (18) there. It took me a minute or two to (19) the door myself. I realized that my companion (20) through the window into the sea.

单选题Evidence from. the economists and the building industries shows that______

单选题A recent poll indicated that half the teenagers in the United States believe that communication between them and their parents is (1) and further that one of the prime causes of this gap is (2) listening behavior. As a(an) (3) in point, one parent believed that her daughter had a severe (4) problem. She was so (5) that she took her to an audiologist to have her ear tested. The audiologist carefully tested both ears and reported back to the parent:"There's nothing wrong with her hearing. She's just (6) you out. " A leading cause of the (7) divorce rate (more than half of all marriages end in divorce) is the failure of husbands and wives to (8) effectively. They don't listen to each other. Neither person (9) to the actual message sent by the other. In (10) fashion, political scientists report that a growing number of people believe that their elected and (11) officials are out of (12) with the constituents they are supposedly (13) Why? Because they don't believe that they listen to them. In fact, it seems that sometimes our politicians don't even listen to themselves. The following is a true story: At a national (14) conference held in Albuquerque some years ago, then Senator Joseph Montoya was (15) a copy of a press release by a press aide shortly before he got up before the audience to (16) a speech. When he rose to speak, (17) the horror of the press aide and the (18) of his audience, Montoya began reading the press release, not his speech. He began, "For immediate release. Senator Joseph M. Montoya, Democrat of New Mexico, last night told the National... " Montoya read the entire six page release, (19) with the statement that he "was repeatedly (20) by applause. /

单选题If you leave a loaded weapon lying around, it is bound to go off sooner or later. Snow-covered northern Europe heard the gunshot loud and clear when Russia cut supplies to Ukraine this week as part of a row about money and power, the two eternal battlegrounds of global energy. From central Europe right across to France on the Atlantic seaboard, gas supplies fell by more than one-third. For years Europeans had been telling themselves that a cold-war enemy which had supplied them without fail could still be depended on now it was an ally ( of sorts). Suddenly, nobody was quite so sure. Fearing the threat to its reputation as a supplier, Russia rapidly restored the gas and settled its differences with Ukraine. But it was an uncomfortable glimpse of the dangers for a continent that imports roughly half its gas and that Gérard Mestrallet, boss of Suez, a French water and power company, expects to be importing 80% of its gas by 2030--much of it from Russia. It was scarcely more welcome for America, which condemned Russia's tactics. And no wonder: it consumes one-quarter of the world's oil, but produces only 3% of the stuff. Over the coming years, the world's dependence on oil looks likely to concentrate on the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. Russian oil had seemed a useful alternative. Fear of the energy weapon has a long history. When producers had the upper hand in the oil embargo of 1973-74, Arab members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cut supply, sowing turmoil and a global recession. When consumers had the upper hand in the early 1990s, the embargo cut the other way. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the world shut in 5m barrels a day (b/d) of production from the two countries in an attempt to force him out. With oil costing $ 60 a barrel, five times more than the nominal price in 1999, and spot prices for natural gas in some European and American markets at or near record levels, power has swung back to the producers for the first time since the early 1980s. Nobody knows how long today's tight markets will last. "It took us a long time to get there and it will take us a long time to get back," says Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy in Washington. A clutch of alarmist books with titles such as "The Death of Oil" predict that so little oil is left in the ground that producers will always have pricing power. The question is how worried consumers should be. What are the threats to energy security and what should the world do about them? The answers suggest a need for planning and a certain amount of grim realism, but not for outright panic.

单选题Today Americans have different eating habits than in the past. There is a wide selection of food available. They have a broader knowledge of nutrition, so they buy more flesh fruit and vegetables than ever before. At the same time, Americans purchase increasing quantities of sweets, snacks and sodas. Statistics show that the way people live determines the way they eat. American life styles have changed. They now include growing numbers of people who live alone, single parents and children, and double-income families. These changing life styles are responsible for the increasing number of people who must rash meals or sometimes skip them altogether. Many Americans have less time than ever before to spend preparing food. Partly as a consequence of this limited time, 60 percent of all American homes now have microwave ovens. Moreover, Americans eat out nearly four times a week on the average. It is easy to study the amounts and kinds of food that people consume. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the food industry-growers, processors, marketers and restaurant managers compile sales statistics and keep accurate records. This information not only tells us what people are eating but also tells us about the changes in attitudes and tastes. Red meat, which used to be the most popular choice for dinner, is no longer an American favorite. Instead, chickens, turkey, and fish have become more popular. Sales of these foods have greatly increased in recent years. This is probably a result of the awareness of the dangers of eating food which contains high levels of cholesterol, or animal fat. Doctors believe that cholesterol is a threat to human health. According to a recent survey, Americans also change their eating patterns to meet the needs of different situations. They have certain ideas about which foods will increase their athletic ability, help them lose weight, make them alert for business meetings, or put them in the mood for romance. For example, Americans choose pasta, fruit, and vegetables, which supply them with carbohydrates, to give them strength for physical activity, such as sports. Adults choose food rich in fiber, such as bread and cereal, for breakfast, and salads for lunch to prepare them for business appointment. For romantic dinners, however, Americans choose shrimp and lobster. While many of these ideas are based on nutritional facts, some are not. Americans' awareness of nutrition, along with their changing tastes and needs, leads them to consume a wide variety of foods—foods for health, for fun, and simply for good taste.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Information technologists have dreamt for decades of making an electronic display that is as good as paper: cheap enough to be pasted on to wails and billboards, clear enough to be read in broad daylight, and thin and flexible enough to be bound as hundreds of flippable leaves to make a book. Over the past few years they have got close. In particular, they have worked out how to produce the display itself, by sandwiching tiny spheres that change colour in response to an electric charge inside thin sheets of flexible, transparent plastic. What they have not yet found is a way to mass-produce flexible electronic circuitry with which to create that charge. But a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that this, too, may be done soon. The process described by John Rogers and his colleagues from Bell Laboratories, an arm of Lucent Technologies, in New Jersey, and E Ink Corporation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starts with E Ink's established half-way house towards true electronic paper. This is based on spheres containing black, liquid dye and particles of white, solid pigment. The pigment particles are negatively charged, so they can be pushed and pulled around by electrodes located above and below the sheet. The electrodes, in turn, are controlled by transistors under the sheet. Each transistor manipulates a single picture element (pixel), making it black or white. The pattern of pixels, in turn, makes up the picture or text on the page. The problem lies in making the transistors and connections. Established ways of doing this, such as photolithography, use silicon as the semiconductor in the transistors. That is all right for applications suck as pesters. It is too fragile and too expensive, though, for genuine electronic paper—which is why cheap and flexible electronic components are needed. For flexibility, Dr Rogers and his colleagues chose pentacene as their semiconductor, and gold as their wiring. Pentacene is a polymer whose semiconducting properties were discovered only recently. Gold is the most malleable metal known, and one of the best electrical conductors. Although it is pricey, so little is needed that the cost per article is tiny. To make their electronic paper the researchers started with a thin sheet of Mylar, a tough plastic, that was coated with indium-tin oxide (ITO), a transparent electrical conductor. To carve this conductor into a suitable electric circuit, they used an innovation called microcontact printing lithography. This trick involves printing the pattern of the circuit on to the ITO using a rubber stamp. The "ink" in the process is a solvent-resistant chemical that protects this part of the ITO while allowing the rest to be dissolved.

单选题The phrase "function in the disservice of one another" ( Line 7, Par

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} It's not only humans that flourish in large settlements. Some ants find urban life so accommodating that their populations explode and they form supercolonies in cities. "One of the most common house ant species might have been built for living in some of the smallest spaces in a forest, but the ants have found ways to take advantage of the comforts of city living," Purdue University said in a statement. Grzegorz Buczkowski, a Purdue University research assistant professor of entomology, discovered odorous house ants live in supercolonies, creating complex networks entomologists have never seen with the species before now. He found that odorous house ant colonies become larger and more complex as they move from forest to city and act somewhat like an invasive species, the university said. "The ants live about 50 to a colony with one queen in forest settings but explode into supercolonies with more than 6 million workers and 50 000 queens in urban areas," the university explained. "This is a native species that's doing this," said Buczkowski, whose results are published in the early online version of the journal Biological Invasions. "Native ants are not supposed to become invasive. We don't know of any other native ants that are outcompeting other species of native ants like these," Buczkowski said. Odorous house ants live in hollow acorn shells in the forest. They're called odorous because they have a coconut (椰子)-or rum-like smell when crushed. They're considered one of the most common house ants, Purdue said. In semi-natural areas that are a cross of forest and urban areas, such as a park, Buczkowski said he observed colonies of about 500 workers with a single queen. "It's possible that as the ants get closer to urban areas they have easier access to food, shelter and other resources," he said. "In the forest, they have to compete for food and nesting sites," Buczkowski said. "In the cities, they don't have that competition. People give them a place to nest, food to eat. " Buczkowski observed the ants in three different settings on and around the Purdue campus. He said it might be expected that if the odorous house ants were able to multiply into complex colonies, other ants would do the same. But Buczkowski found no evidence that other ants had adapted to new environments and evolved into larger groups as the odorous house ants have, Purdie said. "It's possible that odorous house ants are better adapted to city environments than other ant species or that they had somehow outcompeted or dominated other species," he said. "This raises a lot of questions we'd like to answer. " Buczkowski said understanding why the supercolonies form could lead to better control of the pests in homes, as well as ensuring that they don't outcompete beneficial species. Future studies on odorous house ants will include studying the ant's genetics and trying to understand the effects of urbanization of odorous house ants, Purdue said.

单选题The professionals, according to the text, have made a mistake in

单选题Picture-taking is a technique both for reflecting the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer's temperament, discovering itself through the camera's cropping of reality. That is, photography has two directly opposite ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of fearlessness, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all. These conflicting ideals arise from uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture. Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as observer is attracting because it implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed. An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography's means. Whatever are the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression just like painting, its originality is closely linked to the power of a machine. The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton's high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke. But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limit imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident. For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing". Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast. This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past when images had a handmade quality. This longing for some primitive state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers. Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness. (451 words)Notes: crop vt.播种，修剪(树木),收割。count for little 无关紧要。predatory 掠夺成性的。champion n.冠军; vt.支持。benevolent 好心肠的，行善的。ambivalence 矛盾心理。make (+不定式)似乎要：He makes to begin. (他似乎要开始了。) swirls and eddies 漩涡。cult 狂热崇拜。daguerreotype 银板照相法。