单选题Many Europeans have a great puzzle in many things EXCEPT

单选题The expression "follow the headlines" shows ______.

单选题E-mail—can't live with it, can't live without it. Con artists and real artists, advertisers and freedom fighters, lovers and sworn enemies-they’ve all flocked to email as they would to any new medium of expression. E-mail is convenient, saves time, brings us closer to one another, helps us manage our ever-more-complex lives. Books are written, campaigns conducted; crimes committed-all via e-mail. But it is also inconvenient, wastes our time, isolates us in front of our computers and introduces more complexity into our already too-harried lives. To skeptics, E-mails just the latest chapter in the evolving history of human communication. A snooping husband now discovers his wife's affair by reading her private e-mail--but he could have uncovered the same sin by finding letters a generation ago. Yet E-mail-and all online communication-is in fact something truly different; it captures the essence of life at the close of the 20th century with an authority that few other products of digital technology can claim. Does the pace of life seam ever faster? E-mail simultaneously allows us to cope with that acceleration and contributes to it. Are our attention spans shriveling under barrages of new, improved forms of stimulation? The quick and dirty E-mail is made to order for those whose ability to concentrate is measured in nanoseconds. If we accept that the creation of the globespanning Internet is one of the most important technological innovations of the last half of this century, then we must give E-mail--the living embodiment of human connections across the Net--pride of place. The way we interact with each other is changing; E-mail is both catalyst and the instrument of that change. The scope of the phenomenon is mind-boggling. Worldwide, 225 million people can spend and receive E-mail. Forget about the Web or e-commerce or even online pornography: E-mail is the Internet's true killer app—the software application that we simply must have, even if it means buying a $2,000 computer and plunking down ＄20 a month to America Online. According to Donna Hoffman, a professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University, one survey after another finds that when online users are asked what they do on the Net, "E-mail is always No. 1." Oddly enough, no one planned it, and one predicted it. When research scientists first began cooking up the Internet's predecessor, the Arpanet, in 1968, their primary goal was to enable disparate computing centers to share resources. "But it didn't take very long before they discovered that the most important thing was the ability to send mail around, which they had not anticipated at all," says Eric Auman, chief technical officer of Sendmail, Inc.

单选题oracle's current difficulty to take over PeopleSoft is that

单选题Which of the following can best summarize the way the author writes the passage?

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. (40 points){{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The news from America's housing market is getting no better. As sales declines and defaults and foreclosures climb, pessimists fear that over a million Americans could be driven out of their homes as adjustable-rate mortgages are reset. What should policymakers do? Congress is eager to do more: hence the calls to expand the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored enterprises (GSES) that tower over America's mortgage market. Fannie's and Freddie's political allies want two things. The first is the raising of the $417,000 limit on the size of loans that the pair may handle. The second demand is the lifting of caps on the amount of mortgages they may buy and hold for themselves. Fannie and Freddie could then ride to the rescue of struggling borrowers, injecting liquidity into parts of the market that have seized up. Their arguments are winning support, and opposition from the Bush administration and the GSES' regulator is softening. Unfortunately, the ideas are likely to do more for Fannie and Freddie than for the mortgage market. Start with the $417,000 limit. Lifting this could help if Fannie and Freddie scoured the upper bracket for borrowers who were struggling but viable. But their history suggests that they would cherry-pick those who could get refinanced elsewhere. And the huge-mortgage market may be correcting itself anyway: spreads over GSE-backed loans, though still unusually high, are falling. It is also riskier. When they hold a mortgage, they take on not only credit risk but also interest-rate and prepayment risk. The loans they guarantee, in contrast, carry only credit risk. So as well as being just as effective, the guarantee business is also safer—and thus better for the taxpayer who unwittingly stands behind the GSES. Moreover, even if they grow no more, the mortgage giants pose a clear systemic threat. Their portfolios of retained mortgages and mortgage-backed securities add up to no less than $1.4 trillion. It is bad enough that this is concentrated in two institutions. No matter how much risk they take or how they manage it, they can borrow at rock-bottom interest rates. If they got into trouble, banks as well as taxpayers would be on the hook. Banks may hold as much GSE debt as they want. Many have amounts that exceed their regulatory capital. The giants were set up decades ago to help banks pool concentrated regional mortgage risk and to make housing more affordable. But as the market has grown deeper and more sophisticated, history has left them behind—hence their desire to get into any bit of the business that will turn a profit. The eventual aim should be to turn them into normal private-sector companies, by stripping them of the charters that give rise to the implicit government guarantees, and break them into smaller pieces.

单选题How could anybody dislike the notion of fairness? Everything is better when it is fair: a share, a fight, a maiden, or a game. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair and square. For the British fair play is especially important: without it, life isn't cricket. Their country becomes quite pleasant when the weather is fair, though unfortunately it rarely is. And these days fair-trade goods crowd their supermarket shelves. Fairness is not only good, but also moderate, which is another characteristic that the British approve of. It does not claim too much for itself. Those who, on inquiry, admit that their health and fortunes are fair-to-middling navigate carefully between the twin dangers of boastfulness and ill-temperedness, while gesturing in a chinup sort of way towards the possibility of future improvement. Fairness appeals to the British political class, for it has a common sense down-to-earthiness which avoids the grandiosity of American and continental European political discourse while aspiring to do its best for all men--and of course for maidens too, fair and otherwise, for one of its virtues is that it does not discriminate on grounds of either gender or skin colour. Not surprising, then, that Britain's government should grab hold of the word and cling to it in the buffeting the coalition has had since the budget on June 22nd proposed higher taxes and even sharper spending cuts. "Tough but fair" is what George Osborne, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, called the cuts he announced. "It is going to be tough, but it is also very fair," said Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary. At last, something they could agree on. "Fairness" suits Britain's coalition government so well not just because its meanings are all positive, but also because they are wide-ranging. To one lot of people, fairness means establishing the same rules for everybody, playing by them, and letting the best man win and the winner take all. To another, it means making sure that everybody gets equal shares. Those two meanings are not just different: they are opposite. They represent a choice that has to be made between freedom and equality. Yet so slippery--and thus convenient to politicians-- is the English language that a single word encompasses both, and in doing so loses any claim to meaning.

单选题In the third paragraph, the author use the example of laboring people tending to drink standardized beer to _______.

单选题Despite increased airport security since September 11th, 2001, the technology to scan both passengers and baggage for weapons and bombs remains largely unchanged. Travellers walk through metal detectors and carry-on bags pass through x-ray machines that superimpose colour-coded highlights, but do little else. Checked-in luggage is screened by "computed tomography", which peers inside a suitcase rather like a CAT scan of a brain. These systems can alert an operator to something suspicious, but they cannot tell what it is. More sophisticated screening technologies are emerging, albeit slowly. There are three main approaches: enhanced x-rays to spot hidden objects, sensor technology to sniff dangerous chemicals, and radio frequencies that can identify liquids and solids. A number of manufacturers are using "reflective" or "backscatter" x-rays that can be calibrated to see objects through clothing. They can spot things that a metal detector may not, such as a ceramic knife or plastic explosives. But some people think they can reveal too much. In America, civil-liberties groups have stalled the introduction of such equipment, arguing that it is too intrusive. To protect travellers 'modesty, filters have been created to blur genital areas. Machines that can detect minute traces of explosive are also being tested. Passengers walk through a machine that blows a burst of air, intended to dislodge molecules of substances on a person's body and clothes. The air is sucked into a filter, which instantaneously analyses it to see whether it includes any suspect substances. The process can work for baggage as well. It is a vast improvement on today's method, whereby carry-on items are occasionally swabbed and screened for traces of explosives. Because this is a manual operation, only a small share of bags are examined this way. The most radical of the new approaches uses "quadrupole resonance technology". This involves bombarding an object with radio waves. By reading the returning signals, the machines can identify the molecular structure of the materials it contains. Since every compound—solid, liquid or gas—creates a unique frequency, it can be read like a fingerprint. The system can be used to look for drugs as well as explosives. For these technologies to make the jump from development labs and small trials to full deployment at airports they must be available at a price that airports are prepared to pay. They must also be easy to use, take up little space and provide quick results, says Chris Yates, a security expert with Jane's Airport Review. Norman Shanks, an airport security expert, says adding the new technologies costs around $100,000 per machine; he expects the systems to be rolled out commercially over the next 12 months. They might close off one route to destroying an airliner, but a cruel certainty is that terrorists will try to find others.

单选题Denim ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} To understand how astrology works, we should first take a quick look at the sky. Although the stars are at enormous distances, they do indeed give the impression of being affixed to the inner surface of a great hollow sphere surrounding the earth. Ancient people, in fact, literally believed in the existence of such a celestial sphere. As the earth, spins on its axis, the celestial sphere appears to turn about us each day, pivoting at points on a line with the earth's axis of rotation. This daily turning of the sphere carries the stars around the sky, causing most of them to rise and set, but they, and constellations they define, maintains fixed patterns on the sphere, just as the continent of Australian maintains its shape on a spinning globe of the earth. Thus the stars were called fixed stars. The motion of the sun along the ecliptic is, of course, merely a reflection of the revolution of the earth around the sun, but the ancients believed the earth was fixed and the sun had an independent motion of its own, eastward among the stars. The glare of sunlight hides the stars in daytime, but the ancients were aware that the stars were up there even at night, and the slow eastward motion of the sun around the sky, at the rate of about thirty degrees each month, caused different stars to be visible at night at different times of the year. The moon, revolving around the earth each month, also has an independent motion in the sky. The moon, however, changes its position relatively rapidly. Although it appears to rise and set each day, as does nearly everything else in the sky, we can see the moon changing position during as short an interval as an hour or so. The moon's path around the earth lies nearly in the same plane as the earth's path around the sun, so the moon is never seen very far from the ecliptic in the sky. There are five other objects visible to the naked eye that also appear to move in respect to the fixed background of stars on the celestial sphere. These are the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and the Saturn. All of them revolve around the sun in nearly the same plane as the earth does, so they, like the moon, always appear near the ecliptic. Because we see the planets from the moving earth, however, they behave in a complicated way, with their apparent motions' on the celestial sphere reflecting both their own independent motions around the sun and our motion as well.

单选题Social-networking sites offer users easy ways to present idealized images of themselves, even if those ideals don't always square with their real-world personalities. Psychology researcher Soraya Mehdizadeh has discovered a way to poke through the offline-online curtain: she has used Faeebook to predict a person's level of narcissism and self-esteem. Mehdizadeh, who conducted the study as an undergraduate at Toronto's York University, gained access to the Faeebook accounts of 100 college students and measured activities like photo sharing, wall postings and status updates; she also studied how frequently users logged on and how often they remained online during each session. Her findings were published recently in Cyberpsyehology, Behavior and Social Networking. After measuring each subject using the Narcissism Personality Inventory and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, Mehdizadeh, who graduated from York this past spring, discovered narcissists and people with lower self-esteem were more likely to spend more than an hour a day on Facebook and were more prone to post self-promo-tional photos ( striking a pose or using Photoshop, for example). Narcissists were also more likely to showcase themselves through status updates (using phrases like "I'm so glamorous I bleed glitter") and wall activity (posting self-serving links like " My Celebrity Look-alikes" ). Self-esteem and narcissism are often interrelated but don't always go hand in hand. Some psychologists believe that narcissists--those who have a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration, as well as a lack of sympathy--unconsciously inflate their sense of self-importance as a defense against feeling inadequate. Not enough empirical research has been produced to confirm that link, although Mehdizadeh's study seems to support it. Because narcissists have less capacity to sustain intimate or long-term relationships, Mehdizadeh thinks that they would be more drawn to the online world of virtual friends and emotionally detached communication. Although it seems that Facebook can be used by narcissists to fuel their inflated egos, Mehdizadeh stops short of proclaiming that excessive time spent on Faeebook can turn regular users into narcissists. She also notes that social-networking sites might ultimately be found to have positive effects when used by people with low self-esteem or depression. "If individuals with lower self-esteem are more prone to using Facebook," she says, "the question becomes, ' Can Facebook help raise self- esteem by allowing patients to talk to each other and help each other in a socially interactive environment?' I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that people with low self-esteem use Facebook. /

单选题John Battelle is Silicon Valley's Bob Woodward. One of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider. Certainly, Google' s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, believe that it is safer to talk to Mr. Battelle than not to do so. The result is a highly readable account of Google's astonishing rise-the steepest in corporate history-from its origins in Stanford University to its controversial stockmarket debut and its current struggle to become a grown-up company while staying true to its youthfully brash motto, "Don't be evil." Mr. Battelle makes the reader warm to Google's ruling triumvirate-their cleverness and their good intentions-and fear for their future as they take on the world. Google is one of the most interesting companies around at the moment. It has a decent shot at displacing Microsoft as the next great near-monopoly of the information age. Its ambition-to organise all the world's information, not just the information on the world wide web-is epic, and its commercial power is frightening, Beyond this, Google is interesting for the same reason that secretive dictatorships and Hollywood celebrities are interesting-for being opaque, colourful and, simply, itself. The book disappoints only when Mr. Battelle begins trying to explain the wider relevance of internet search and its possible future development. There is a lot to say on this subject, but Mr. Battelle is hurried and overly chatty, producing laundry lists of geeky concepts without really having thought any of them through properly. This is not a fatal flaw. Read only the middle chapters, and you have a great book.

单选题Which of the following best describes the function of the concluding sentence of the passage?