单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined the second bubbly half of the 1990s. That period, readers might recall, was characterized by a collective splurge that saw the creation of some of the most indebted companies in history, many of which later went bankrupt or were themselves broken up. Wild bidding for telecoms, internet and media assets, not to mention the madness that was Daimler's $40 billion motoring takeover in 1998-1999 of Chrysler or the Time-Warner/AOL mega-merger in 2000, helped to give mergers a thoroughly bad name. A consensus emerged that M&A was a great way for investment banks to reap rich fees, and a sure way for ambitious managers to betray investors by trashing the value of their shares. Now M&A is back. Its return is a global phenomenon, but it is perhaps most striking in Europe, where so far this year there has been a stream of deals worth more than $600 billion in total, around 40% higher than in the same period of 2004. The latest effort came this week when France's Saint-Gobain, a building-materials firm, unveiled the details of its￡3.6 billion ($6.5 billion) hostile bid for BPB, a British rival. In the first half of the year, cross-border activity was up threefold over the same period last year. Even France Telecom, which was left almost bankrupt at the end of the last merger wave, recently bought Amena , a Spanish mobile operator. Shareholder's approval of all these deals raises an interesting question for companies everywhere, are investors right to think that these mergers are more likely to succeed than earlier ones? There are two answers. The first is that past mergers may have been judged too harshly. The second is that the present rash of European deals does look more rational, but-and the caveat is crucial-only so far. The pattern may not hold. M&A 's poor reputation stems not only from the string of spectacular failures in the 1990s, but also from studies that showed value destruction for acquiring shareholders in 80% of deals. But more recent studies by economists have introduced a note of caution. Investors should look at the number of deals that succeed or fail (typically measured by the impact on the share price), rather than (as you might think) weighing them by size. For example, no one doubts that the Daimler-Chrysler merger destroyed value. The combined market value of the two firms is still below that of Daimler alone before the deal. This single deal accounted for half of all German M&A activity by value in 1998 and 1999, and probably dominated people's thinking about mergers to the same degree. Throw in a few other such monsters and it is no wonder that broad studies have tended to find that mergers are a bad idea. The true picture is more complicated.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Eco-tourism—travel that preserves the environment and promotes the welfare of local people— continues to gain force. Impressed by the success of countries like Costa Rica and Ecuador, which have lured flocks of travelers for mountain treks and jungle safaris, a growing number of regions across tile globe are turning to eco-tourism as a strategy' for economic growth. Omar Bongo, the president of Gabon, a developing country in west central Africa, bas set aside about 10 percent of the country's landmass for 13 national parks. Green Visions, a tourism and environment protection company, based in Sarajevo. Bosnia-Herzegovina, is pioneering an eco-tourism development plan in Central Europe with "green adventures" that promote environmental principles and support local businesses. Even Greece, better known for its pumping night life and archaeological monuments, devotes a section of its national tourism' Web site to "Greek nature" and eco-tourism. Over the last four years, at least 48 countries, from Puerto Rico to Portugal, have created or started to define a national strategy for eco-tourism development, according to a 2004 eco-tourism report by Mintel International Group, a market-research company based in Britain. Though eco-tourism has long conjured images of biodiversity hot spots in countries like Belize, parts of the United States are starting to embrace the trend too. For example, the Wisconsin Department of Tourism will begin testing a new certification program in March called Travel Green Wisconsin. Designed to encourage hotels and tour operators to reduce their environmental impact, the program is aimed at protecting the natural areas that play a significant role in defining the state as a tourist destination. If. successful, the program will be rolled out statewide next year. For businesses, eco-friendly initiatives not only offer marketing advantages but can help with the bottom line. Hotels can cut costs by doing everything from installing energy-saving light bulbs to asking travelers to reuse their towels. And some 58.5 million U.S. travelers, or 38 percent, would pay more to use travel companies that strive to protect and preserve the environment, according to a study by the Travel Industry Association of America sponsored by National Geographic Traveler. Of those travelers. 61 percent said they would pay 5 to 10 percent more to use such companies. However. selecting among the growing number of eco-friendly choices can be frightening, especially given the ever-broadening category, which now encompasses everything from basic campsites to high-end mountain lodges, lama trekking to motorcycle tours through the jungle. Enter the Sustainable Tourism Certification Network of the Americas—a partnership of certification programs, environmental groups, government organizations and others, led by the Rainforest. Alliance and the International Ecotourism Society—which aims to promote sustainability and higher environmental and social standards for tourism. In September, the network designed a series of baseline criteria for certification to help generate credibility among members and promote local conservation. This year, the document will be put up for public consultation before being fully ratified. "Certification is a way for us to avoid green washing," the practice of promoting something as ecotourism while behaving in an environmentally irresponsible way, said Ronald Sanabria. director of sustainable tourism at the Rainforest Alliance. "Certification for us is a tool to avoid that and to ensure third-party assessments of requirements and really prove the company."

单选题What our society suffers from most today is the absence of consensus about what it and life in it ought to be; such consensus cannot be gained from society's present stage, or from fantasies about what it ought to be. For that the present is too close and too diversified, and the future too uncertain, to make believable claims about it. A consensus in the present hence can be achieved only through a shared understanding of the past, as Homer's epics informed those who lived centuries later What it meant to be Greek, and by what images and ideals they were to live their lives and organize their societies. Most societies derive consensus from a long history, a language all their own, a common religion, common ancestry. The myths by which they live are based on all of these. But the United States is a country of immigrants, coming from a great variety of nations. Lately, it has been emphasized that an asocial, narcissistic personality has become characteristic of Americans, and that it is this type of personality that makes for the lack of well-being, because it prevents us from achieving consensus that would counteract a tendency to withdraw into private worlds. In this study of narcissism, Christopher Lash says that modern man, "tortured by self-consciousness, turns to new therapies not to free himself of his personal worries hut to find meaning and purpose in life, to find something to live for". There is widespread distress because national morale has declined, and we have lost an earlier sense of national vision and purpose. Contrary to rigid religions or political beliefs, as are found in totalitarian societies, our culture is one of the great individual differences, at least in principle and in theory; but this leads to disunity, even chaos. Americans believe in the value of diversity, but just because ours is a society based on individual diversity, it needs consensus about some dominating ideas more than societies based on uniform origin of their citizens. Hence, if we are to have consensus, it must be based on a myth--a vision about a common experience, a conquest that made us Americans, as the myth about the conquest of Troy formed the Greeks. Only a common myth can offer relief from the fear that life is without meaning or purpose. Myths permit us to examine our place in the world by comparing it to a shared idea. Myths are shared fantasies that form the tie that binds the individual to other members of his group. Such myths help to ward off feelings of isolations, guilt, anxiety, and purposelessness--in short, they combat isolation and the breakdown of social standards and values.

单选题What will the succeeding paragraph, should there be one, most probably discuss?

单选题In the dimly lit cyber-cafe at Sciences-Po, hot-house of the French elite, no Gauloise smoke fills the air, no dog-eared copies of Sartre lie on the tables. French students are doing what all students do: surfing the web via Google. Now President Jacques Chirac wants to stop this American cultural invasion by setting up a rival French search-engine. The idea was prompted by Google's plan to put online millions of texts from American and British university libraries. If English books are threatening to swamp cyberspace, Mr Chirac will not stand idly by. He asked his culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noёl Jeanneney, head of France' s Bibliothèque Nationale, to do the same for French text—and create a home-grown search-engine to browse them. Why not let Google do the job? Its French version is used for 74% of intemet searches in France. The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. "I do not believe", wrote Mr Donnedieu de Vabres in Le Monde," that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google' s success." This is not the first time Google has met French resistance. A court has upheld a ruling against it, in a lawsuit brought by two firms that claimed its display of rival sponsored links (Google' s chief source of revenues) constituted trademark counterfeiting. The French state news agency, Agence France-Presse, has also filed suit against Google for copyright infringement. Googlephobia is spreading. Mr Jeanneney has talked of the "risk of crushing domination by America in defining the view that future generations have of the world. "" I have nothing in paricular against Google, "he told L'Express, a magazine. "I simply note that this commercial cial company is the expression of the American system, in which the law of the market is king. " Advertising muscle and consumer demand should not triumph over good taste and cultural sophistication. The flaws in the French plan are obvious. If popularity cannot arbitrate, what will? Mr Jeanneney wants a "committee of experts". He appears to be serious, though the supply of French-speaking experts, or experts speaking any language for that matter, would seem to be insufficient. And if advertising is not to pay, will the taxpayer? The plan mirrors another of Mr Chirac' s pet projects: a CNNàla francaise. Over a year ago, stung by the power of Englishspeaking television news channels in the Iraq war, Mr Chirac promised to set up a French rival by the end of 2004. The project is bogged down by infighting. France's desire to combat English, on the web or the airwaves, is understandable. Protecting France's tongue from its citizens' inclination to adopt English words is an ancient hobby of the rifling elite. The Académie Francaise was set up in 1635 to that end. Linguists devise translations of cyber-terms, such as arrosage (spam) or bogue(bug). Laws limit the use of English on TV—"Super Nanny" and "Star Academy" are current pests—and impose translations of English slogans in advertising. Treating the invasion of English as a market failure that must be corrected by the state may look clumsy. In France it is just business as usual.

单选题The problem to be taken up and the point at which the search for a solution will begin are customarily prescribed by the investigator (1) a subject participating in an (2) on thinking (or by the programmer for a computer). (3) , prevailing techniques of (4) in the psychology of thinking have invited (5) of the motivational aspects of thinking. The conditions that determine when the person will begin to think in (6) to some other activity, what he will think about, what direction his thinking will take, and when he will regard his search for a solution as successfully terminated (or abandon it as not worth pursuing further) (7) are beginning to attract investigation. (8) much thinking is aimed at (9) ends, special motivational problems are raised by "disinterested" thinking, in which the (10) of an answer to a question is a source of satisfaction in itself. For computer specialists, the detection of a mismatch between the formula that the program so far has (11) and some formula or set of requirements that (12) a solution is what impels continuation of the search and determines the direction it will (13) . Neo-behaviorists (like psychoanalysts) have made much of secondary (14) value and stimulus generalization; i. e. , the tendency of a stimulus pattern to become a source of satisfaction if it resembles or has (15) accompanied some form of biological gratification. The insufficiency of this kind of explanation becomes apparent, (16) , when the importance of novelty, surprise, complexity, incongruity, ambiguity, and (17) is considered. Inconsistency between beliefs, between items of incoming sensory information, or between one's belief and an item of sensory information (18) can be a source of discomfort impelling a (19) for resolution through reorganization of belief (20) or through selective acquisition of new information.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on Answer Sheet 1. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Violent lyrics in songs increase aggression - related thoughts and emotions and could indirectly create a more hostile social environment, a study released on Sunday by a U. S. psychology association found. The Washington D.C. -based American Psychological Association (APA) released the study, resulting from five experiments involving over 500 college students, in the May issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The violent songs increased feelings of hostility without provocation or threat, according to the study. It said the effect was not the result of differences in musical style, specific performing artist or arousal properties of the songs. Even the humorous violent songs increased aggressive thoughts, the study said. The group said the study contradicts a popular notion that listening to angry, violent music actually serves as a positive catharsis for people. The music industry came under criticism from lawmakers in October for failing to use more descriptive parental advisory labels that specify whether the music contains sex, violence or strong language. But the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has said that current CD labels give parents enough information without violating the right to free expression. The RIAA is the trade group for the world's five big labels, including AOL Time Warner Inc. , EMI Group Plc., Bertelsmann AG, Vivendi Universal's Universal Music and Sony Corp.. Results of the APA's experiments showed that violent songs led to more aggressive interpretations of ambiguously aggressive words and increased the relative speed with which people read aggressive versus non-aggressive words. "Such aggression-biased interpretations can, in turn, instigate a more aggressive response, verbal or physical, than would have been emitted in a nonbiased state, thus provoking an aggressive escalatory spiral of antisocial exchanges," said researcher Craig Anderson, in a statement. While researchers said repeated exposure to violent lyrics could indirectly create a more hostile social environment, they said it was possible the effects of violent songs may last only a fairly short time.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Trying to get Americans to eat a healthy diet is a frustrating business. Even the best-designed public-health campaigns cannot seem to compete with the tempting flavors of the snack-food and fast-food industries and their fat-and sugar-laden products. The results are apparent on a walk down any American street—more than 60% of Americans are overweight, and a full quarter of them are overweight to the point of obesity. Now, health advocates say, an ill-conceived redesign-has taken one of the more successful public-health campaigns--the Food Guide Pyramid--and rendered it confusing to the point of uselessness. Some of these critics worry that America' s Department of Agriculture caved to pressure from parts of the food industry anxious to protect theft products. The Food Guide Pyramid was a graphic which emphasizes that a healthy diet is built on a base of gains, vegetables and fruits, followed by ever-decreasing amounts of dairy products, meat, sweets and oils. The agriculture department launched the pyramid in 1992 to replace its previous program, which was centered on the idea of four basic food groups. The "Basic Four" campaign showed a plate divided into quarters, and seemed to imply that meat and dairy products should make up haft of a healthy diet, with grains, fruits and vegetables making up the other half. It was replaced only over the strenuous objections of the meat and dairy industries. The old pyramid was undoubtedly imperfect. It failed to distinguish between a doughnut and a whole-grain roll, or a hamburger and a skinless chicken breast, and it did not make clear exactly how much of each foodstuff to eat. It did, however, manage to convey the basic idea of proper proportions in an easily understandable way. The new pyramid, called "My Pyramid", abandons the effort to provide this information. Instead, it has been simplified to a mere logo. The food groups are replaced with unlabelled, multi-colored vertical stripes which, in some versions, rise out of a cartoon jumble of foods that look like the aftermath of a riot at a grocery store. Anyone who wants to see how this translates into a healthy diet is invited to go to a website, put in their age, sex and activity level, and get a custom-designed pyramid, complete with healthy food choices and suggested portion sizes. This is free for those who are motivated, but might prove too much effort for those who most need such information. Admittedly, the designers of the new pyramid had a tough job to do. They were supposed to condense the advice in the 84-page United States' Dietary Guidelines into a simple, meaningful graphic suitable for printing on the back of a cereal box. And they had to do this in the face of pressure from dozens of special interest groups--from the country' s Potato Board, which thought potatoes would look nice in the picture, to the Almond Board of California, which felt the same way about almonds. Even the National Watermelon Promotion Board and the California Avocado Commission were eager to see their products recognized. Nevertheless, many health advocates believe the new graphic is a missed opportunity. Although officials insist industry pressure had nothing to do with the eventual design, some critics suspect that political influence was at work. On the other hand, it is not clear how much good even the best graphic could do. Surveys found that 80% of Americans recognized the old Food Guide Pyramid--a big success in the world of public-health campaigns. Yet only 16% followed its advice.

单选题Based on the text, people have reached a consensus that

单选题By what means do the children of the author' s family go to school?

单选题Nuclear fission is the splitting of the nucleus of an atom. Only a few elements are suitable for use in this way, the most important ones being Uranium-235, Uranium-233, and Plutonium-239. When a nucleus of one of these elements is struck by a free neutron it breaks down into two lighter nuclei which fly apart at high speed, colliding with surrounding atoms. Their kinetic energy is converted into heat energy. At the same time, two or three free neutrons are released and one of them enters the nucleus of a neighbouring atom, causing fission to occur again; and so on. The reaction spreads very quickly, with more and more heat energy released. This is called a "chain" reaction because the splitting of each nucleus is linked to another, and another and another. If this reaction takes place in an atomic bomb, where nothing is done to slow it down, the result is a violent explosion that can destroy a town in a few seconds. Fission can also, however, take place within a construction called a nuclear reactor, or atomic pile. Here the highly fissile material (U-235, U-233, Pu-239) is surrounded by a substance that is non-fissile, for instance graphite. This material is called a moderator. The neutrons lose some of their energy and speed through colliding with the atoms of the moderator. Energy—heat energy—is still created on an enormous scale, but no expansion takes place. The moderator has another function: by slowing down the speed of the free neutrons, it makes it more likely that one of them will collide with the nucleus of a neighbouring atom to continue the chain reaction. The chief advantage of nuclear energy is that it does not depend on any local factors. A nuclear reactor, unlike an oil-well or a coalmine, does not have to be sited on top of a fossil-fuel source; unlike the solar energy unit, it does not have to go out of production when the sun is not shining; unlike hydro-electric power, it does not depend on a large flow of water which may be reduced during some seasons of the year. With an atomic power station, the only limiting factor is that of safety. In the opposite process, nuclear fusion, two nuclei come together, to form a new nucleus of a different kind and this process also releases energy on an enormous scale. Fusion can only occur under conditions of very great heat—at least 50000000 degrees Celsius. (The temperature at the centre of the sun is estimated as 130000000 degrees Celsius.) A fusion reaction on earth has already been created—the hydrogen bomb. This is an uncontrolled reaction. It is not yet possible to produce a controlled fusion reaction that can be used for the production of useful energy. Nuclear energy can be thought of as a kind of square, Three of the quarters of the square are known and used, but the fourth cannot yet be used.

单选题Michasson may NOT support the idea to

单选题Which of the following reflects the change of Catholic Church?

单选题Like all the huge metropolises of the world, there are lots of diversions both outdoors and indoors in Chicago. The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the world's (1) art collections, including more French Impressionist paintings than even in the Paris Louvre itself. The Field Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Science and Industry are also great historical and cultural treasure houses to (2) as well as entertain children and adults (3) In the Field Museum one comes (4) a surprisingly big collection of Chinese exhibits from the ancient (5) to the early century. The Sears Tower and the Buckingham Fountain are the pride of the Chicagoans; (6) having 110 storeys is said to be the highest tower in the world and the (7) is the largest fountain in the United States. Lake Michigan is for yachting in summer time, (8) the highlights of Chicago life all the year round are concerts, operas and plays (9) by the city's orchestra, opera houses and theatres. In summer, especially around the Independence Day, July 4th, many festivals and fairs are given outdoors, which, (10) crowds and crowds of people, with their parades, fireworks, (11) concerts, water-skiing and good foods. But with all its attractions and beautiful spots Chicago is also a city (12) for crimes. All the dwelling houses are (13) with three doors and visitors have to speak through microphone (14) in the wall to the residents before they can get admitted. In the streets there are white-color telephones. When one finds oneself (15) , he needs only to knock the receiver (16) the hook and the next instant the police will (17) . If one does not drive a car, it may well be dangerous for him or her to go out alone in the evening. At first I did not take this warning seriously. (18) , my two encounters with the Black people (19) dusk in the neighborhood were so unpleasant and frightening that I have (20) shut myself evenings in my room, in almost all studying, imposing a curfew on myself.