单选题According to the author, British businesses ______.

单选题According to the text, the most important thing for the futurists to grasp is

单选题Of all the truths that this generation of Americans hold self-evident, few are more deeply embedded in the national psyche than the maxim "It pays to go to collage." Since the Gl Bill transformed higher education in the aftermath of W. W. II, a college diploma, once a birthright of the leisured few, has become a lodestone for the upwardly mobile, as integral to the American dream as the pursuit of happiness itself. The numbers tell the story: In 1950s, 43% of high-school graduates went on to pursue some form of higher education; at the same time, only 6% of Americans were college graduates. But by 1992, almost 2 to out of 3 secondary-school graduates were opting for higher education—and 21% of a much larger U.S. population had college diplomas. As Prof. Herbert London of New York University told a commencement audience last June: "The college experience has gone from a rite passage to a right of passage." However, as the class of 1993 is so painfully discovering, while a college diploma remains a requisite credential for ascending the economic ladder, it no longer guarantees the good life. Rarely since the end of the Great Depression has the job outlook for college graduates appeared so bleak: of the 1.1 million students who received their baccalaureate degrees last spring, fewer than 20% had lined up full-time employment by commencement. Indeed, an uncertain job market has precipitated a wave of economic fear and trembling among the young. "Many of my classmates are absolutely terrified," says one of the fortunate few who did manage to land a permanent position. "They wonder if they'll ever find a job." Some of this recession-induced anxiety will dissipate if a recovery finally begins to generate jobs at what economists consider a normal rate. But the sad fact is that for the foreseeable future, college graduates will be in considerable surplus, enabling employers to require a degree even for jobs for which a college education is really unnecessary. According to Kristina Shelley of the Bureau of Labor Statistics—who bases her estimate on a "moderate projection" of current trends—30 percent of college graduates entering the labor force between now and the year 2005 will be unemployed or will find employment in jobs for which they will be overqualified, joining what economists call the "educationally underutilized". Indeed, it may be quite a while—if ever—before those working temporarily as cocktail waitresses or taxi drivers will be able to pursue their primary career paths. Of course waiting on tables and bustling cab fares are respectable ways to earn a living. But they are not quite what so many young Americans—and their parents—had in mind as the end product of four expensive years in college.

单选题As Dr. Samuel Johnson said in a different era about ladies preaching the surprising thing about computers is not that they think less well than a man, but that they think at all. The early electronic computer did not have much going for it except a marvelous memory and some good math skills. But today the best models can be wired up to learn by experience, follow an argument, ask proper questions and write poetry and music. They can also carry on somewhat puzzling conversations. Computers imitate life. As computers get more complex, the imitation gets better. Finally, the line between the original and the copy becomes unclear. In another 15 years or so, we will see the computer as a new form of life. The opinion seems ridiculous because, for one thing, computers lack the drives and emotions of living creatures. But drives can be programmed into the computer's brain just as a new form of life. Computers match people in some roles, and when fast decisions are needed in a crisis, they often surpass them. Having evolved when the pace of life was slower, the human brain has an inherent defect that prevents it from absorbing several streams of information simultaneously and acting on them quickly. Throw too many things at the brain at one time and it freezes up. We are still in control, but the capabilities of computers are increasing at a fantastic rate, while raw human intelligence is changing slowly, if at all. Computer power has increased ten times every eight years since 1846. In the 1990s, when the sixth generation appears, the reasoning power of an intelligence built out of silicon will begin to match that of the human brain. That does not mean the evolution of intelligence has ended on the earth. Judging by the past, we can expect that a new species will arise out of man, surpassing his achievements as he has surpassed those of his predecessor. Only a carbon chemistry enthusiast would assume that the new species must be man's flesh-and-blood descendants. The new kind of intelligent life is more likely to be made of silicon.

单选题The purpose of the economists' research at the University of Iowa is to

单选题A study of art history might be a good way to learn more about a culture than that is possible to learn in general history classes. Most (1) history courses concentrate on politics, economics, and war. (2) , art history (3) on much more than this because art reflects not only the political values of a people, but also religious (4) , emotions, and psychology. (5) , information about the daily activities of our own can be provided by art. In short, art expresses the (6) qualities of a time and a place, and a study of it clearly offers us a deeper understanding than what can be found in most history books. In history books, objective information about the political life of a country is (7) ; that is, facts about political are given, but (8) are not expressed. Art, on the other hand, is (9) : it reflects emotions and impressions. The great Spanish painter Francisco Goya severely criticized the Spanish government for its (10) of power over people. Over a hundred years later, symbolic (11) were used in Pablo Picasso's Guemica to express the (12) of war. (13) , on another continent, the powerful paintings of Diego Rivera depicted these Mexican artists' concealed 14 and sadness about social problems. In the same way, art can (15) a culture's religious beliefs. For hundreds of years in Europe, religious art was (16) the only type of art that existed. Churches and other religious buildings were filled with paintings that depicted people and stories from the Bible. (17) most people couldn't read, they could still understand biblical stories in the pictures on church walls. (18) , one of the main characteristics of art in the Middle East was (and still is) its (19) of human and animal images. This reflects the Islamic belief that statues are (20) .

单选题One of the many pleasures of watching Mad Men , a television drama about the advertising industry in the early 1960s, is examining the ways in which office life has changed over the years. One obvious change makes people feel good about themselves: they no longer treat women as second-class citizens. But the other obvious change makes them feel a bit more uneasy : they have lost the art of enjoying themselves at work. The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialised not in order to bond , but in order to get drunk. Nowadays many companies are obsessed with fun. Software firms in Silicon Valley have installed rock-climbing walls in their reception areas and put inflatable animals in their offices. Wal-Mart orders its cashiers to smile at all and sundry. The cult of fun has spread like some disgusting haemorrhagic disease. This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves on devolving power to front-line workers. But surveys show that only 20% of workers are" fully engaged with their job ". Even fewer are creative. Managers hope that " fun" will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite—at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition. The most unpleasant thing about the fashion for fun is that it is mixed with a large dose of pressure. Boston Pizza encourages workers to send" golden bananas" to colleagues who are "having fun while being the best". Behind the" fun" there often lurks some crude management thinking: a desire to brand the company as better than its rivals, or a plan to boost productivity through team-building. Twitter even boasts that it has" worked hard to create an environment that spawns productivity and happiness". While imposing fake fun on their employees, companies are battling against the real thing. Many force smokers to huddle outside like furtive criminals. Few allow their employees to drink at lunch time, let alone earlier in the day. A regiment of busybodies— from lawyers to human resources functionaries—is waging war on office romance, particularly between people of different ranks. The merchants of fake fun have met some resistance. When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff—such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with coworkers—it touched off a guerrilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006. But such victories are rare. For most wage slaves forced to pretend they are having fun at work, the only relief is to poke fun at their tormentors . Mad Men reminds people of a world they have lost—a world where bosses did not tbink that"fun" was a management tool and where employees could happily quaff Scotch at noon. Cheers to that.

单选题Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. One thing is clear: the era of (1) Oil is over. What we all do next will determine how well we meet the energy needs of the entire world in this century and (2) .Demand is soaring like (3) before. As populations grow and economies (4) , millions in the developing world are enjoying the benefits of a lifestyle that (5) increasing amounts of energy. In fact, some say that in 20 years the world will (6) 40% more oil than it does today. At the same time, many of the world's oil and gas fields are (7) . And new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to (8) , physically, economically and even politically. When growing demand meets (9) supplies, the result is more (10) for the same resources. We can wait until a crisis forces us to do something. (11) we can (12) to working together, and start by asking the (13) questions: How do we meet the energy needs of the developing world and those of industrialized nations? What role will renewables and (14) energies play? What is the best way to protect our environment? How do we accelerate our conservation efforts? (15) actions we take, we must look not just to next year, (16) to the next 50 years. At Chevron, we believe that innovation, collaboration and conservation are the (17) on which to build this new world. We cannot do this alone. Corporations, governments and every citizen of this planet must be part of the solution as (18) as they are part of the problem. We (19) scientists and educators, politicians and policy-makers, environmentalists, leaders of industry and each one of you to be part of (20) the next era of energy.

单选题 Fat: what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, or so you might think. But obesity seems to protect mice against a fatal form of malaria-cerebral malaria. Working out how it has this effect might lead to new treatments for people. Although obesity is now on the rise in the developing world, it has traditionally been seen as a malaise of the rich. In contrast, malaria tends to be regarded as a disease of the poor, so few people have studied how the two conditions affect each other. In mice meanwhile, there are signs that diabetes, which often affects obese people, might offer some protection against malaria. To find out more about how obesity affects malaria in mice, Vincent Robert at the Institute for Development Research (IRD) in Paris, France, and colleagues injected 14 obese and 14 non-obese mice with the malaria parasite Plasmodium berghei. After six days, eight of the non-obese mice died from cerebral malaria, which causes coma and death in humans, and the rest died about two weeks later from severe anemia because the parasite had destroyed their red blood cells. In contrast, none of the obese mice showed signs of cerebral malaria. Although they all eventually succumbed to severe anemia and died 18 to 25 days after infection, anemia can be treated-so obesity did seem to offer mice some useful protection. Exactly how the obese mice resist malaria is not clear, says Delphine Depoix from the Museum of Natural History in Paris, but there are several possibilities. One clue lies in a mutation in the gene coding for the leptin, a hormone produced by fat cells, which makes the mice obese, but also controls the immune response. Previous research has shown that obese mice with the leptin mutation often react to infections with a "Th2" rather than "Th1" response. As Th1 in mice is thought to trigger the inflammation that helps cerebral malaria to kill its victims, Depoix speculates that the Th2 response might be protecting the obese mice. Another possible explanation is that the abnormally high blood sugar associated with obesity in both mice and people "might compensate" for the low blood sugar caused by severe malaria, says Depoix, allowing the mice to better cope with parasite infection. Andrew Prentice of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says that figuring out how the mice resist malaria will be crucial to developing new treatments for people with malaria. His colleague Christopher Whitty warns that any insights drawn from these results are preliminary: "Mouse models are always useful in raising hypotheses but cannot settle them as far as cerebral malaria is concerned."

单选题According to the passage, the decline of Shell

单选题Compared to the yearly price changes that actually occurred on foreign agricultural markets during the 1880’s American farmers would have most preferred yearly price changes that were

单选题In the United States today, coffee is a more popular drink (1) tea, but tea played (2) interesting part in the history of the United States. Before they won their (3) from Britain, the colonists were forced to (4) taxes on many goods imported into America. The tax money was (5) to support colonial governors and officials sent to the colonies by the British. In 1770 the British Prime Minister had repealed most of the taxes, but King George (6) on retaining the tax (7) tea. The King saw the tax as a (8) of the British right to tax the colonies. American merchants (9) smuggled nine-tenths of America's tea into the country and (10) paying the taxes. (11) the tax savings, the price of tea remained expensive due. to (12) shipping costs. When the British Parliament (13) a new law which would allow British companies to import tea more (14) than American shipping companies, the (15) were alarmed and they (16) a protest. In Boston citizens and merchants, who (17) disguised as Indians, boarded a British ship and (18) ＄15000 worth of tea into the harbor. This protest (19) Great Britain is known as the Boston Tea Party. It was one of the earliest acts of (20) against British rule.