单选题It vanished in 2002, a result of a bad fall. As my neurosurgeon explained, when my head hit the ground, my brain sloshed around, which smashed delicate nerve endings in my olfactory system. Maybe they'll repair themselves, she said (in what struck me as much too casual a tone ), and maybe they won't, If I had to lose something, it might as well have been smell; at least nothing about my personality or my memory had changed, as can happen with head trauma. So it seemed almost churlish to feel, as the months went on, so devastated by this particular loss. But I was heartbroken. My sense of smell was always something I took pleasure in. Without scent, I felt as ff I were walking around the city without my contact lenses, dealing with people while wearing earplugs, moving through something sticky and thick. The sharpness of things, their specificity, diminished. I couldn't even tell when the milk had gone bad. Oddly, my sense of taste remained perfectly fine, but I was still nervous about opening a carton of yogurt without having someone nearby to sniff it for me. I had been stripped of the sense we all use, often without realizing it, to negotiate the world, to know which things are safe and which are dangerous. After nearly a year, I talked to a colleague savvying about neuro-science, who suggested I try to retrain my sense of smell on the assumption that the nerve endings had repaired themselves but that something was still broken along the pathway from nose to brain, where odor molecules activate olfactory receptors (the subject of this year's Nobel-winning research) . Her advice was to expose myself to strong, distinctive fragrances, asking the person I was with to tell me exactly what I was smelling even if I wasn't conscious of smelling anything at all. I began sticking my nose into everything that seemed likely to have a scent-the cumin in the spice cabinet, freshly ground coffee, red wine. I interrupted friends midsentence if we happened to be walking past a pizza place or a garbage truck and asked, stupidly, "What are you smelling now?" Slowly, the smell therapy started to work. At first, distressingly, all I could smell were unnatural scents: dandruff shampoo, furniture polish, a cloud of after-shave from a stocky young man. The first time I smelled cut grass again, in the small park near the American Museum of Natural History, was almost exactly two years after my fall. It made me cry. The tears embarrassed me, but cut grass is one of those fragrances that transport me directly to the landscape of childhood. And that's what I had been missing, really, and why getting back my sense of smell was so precious: a visceral connection to the person I used to be.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}Directions: Read the following texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answer on ANSWER SHEET 1. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Children attending schools located in high-traffic zones have a 45 percent increased risk of developing asthma, even though time spent at school only accounts for about one-third of a child's waking hours, according to new research. Asthma is the most common chronic childhood illness in developed countries and has been linked to environmental factors such as traffic-related air pollution. "While residential traffic-related pollution has been associated with asthma, there has been little study of the effects of traffic exposure at school on new onset asthma," says Rob McConnell, professor of preventive medicine at USC's Keck School of Medicine. "Exposure to pollution at locations other than home, especially where children spend a large portion of their day and may engage in physical activity, appears to influence asthma risk as well." The study appears online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The study drew upon data from the Children's Health Study (CHS), a longitudinal study of children in Southern California communities that was designed to investigate the chronic effects of air pollution on respiratory health. Using a cohort of 2 497 kindergarten and first grade children who were asthma-free when they entered the study, researchers examined the relationship of local traffic around schools and homes to diagnosis new onset asthma that occurred during three years of follow-up. Traffic-related pollution exposure was assessed based on a model that took into account traffic volume, distance to major roadways from home and school and local weather conditions. Regional ambient ozone, nitrogen dioxide (二氧化氮) and particulate matter were measured continuously at one central site in each of the 13 study communities. The design allowed investigators to examine the joint effects of local traffic-related pollution exposure at school and at home and of regional pollution exposure affecting the entire community. Researchers found 120 cases of new asthma. The risk associated with traffic-related pollution exposure at schools was almost as high as for residential exposure, and combined exposure accounting for time spent at home and at school had a slightly larger effect. Although children spend less time at school than at home, physical education, and other activities that take place at school may increase ventilation rates and the dose of pollutants getting into the lungs, McConnell notes. Traffic-related pollutant levels may also be higher during the morning hours when children are arriving at school. Despite a state law that prohibits school districts from building campuses within 500 feet of a freeway, many Southern California schools are located near high-traffic areas, including busy surface streets. "It's important to understand how these micro-environments where children spent a lot of their time outside of the home are impacting their health," McConnell says. "Policies that reduce exposure to high-traffic environments may help to prevent this disease. " The study was funded by grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and the Hastings Foundation.

单选题Like many Americans, Mark Seery watched the Virginia Tech school shooting unfold on the cable news networks in April 2007. It wasn"t just the catastrophe that disturbed him—it was how some psychologists were advising the campus community to respond in the wake of the devastating tragedy. "There"s a sense that"s very much alive within the professional community that if people don"t talk about what they"re feeling, and try to suppress it, somehow it will only rebound down the road and make things worse," says Seery, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo. That, says Seery, is one of many examples of situations in which the first response to a tragedy"s psychological ramifications is to encourage victims and bystanders to talk about their emotions in the wake of the event. That idea is constantly reinforced by a battery of television therapists who harp on the importance of sharing your feelings. But is that really the best medicine? Seery"s new research offers an alternative to that philosophy. His work suggests that those who do not reveal their feelings in the wake of a collective trauma turn out just fine, if not better, than those who do. Seery used an online survey to query a national sample about their reactions to the 9/11 attacks, beginning on the day itself. The respondents were divided into two groups: those who said they were initially unwilling to talk about their feelings, and the rest. At the end of the two-year survey period, those who decided not to share their feelings reported fewer related mental and physical problems. That effect was even more pronounced among those who lived close to the tragedy. Seery also found an interesting correlation between the level of sharing and well-being. Participants could decide how much they wanted to report about their feelings on the survey. Seery found that there was a correlation between those who wrote the lengthier, more in-depth descriptions of their feelings and those who had worse mental and physical statuses. Does the study turn conventional wisdom completely on its head, suggesting that it"s better to stay quiet in the aftermath of a traumatic event? Not quite. Seery explains that the respondents who felt the need to divulge their emotions started off in a worse mental and physical state in the first place, likely a bit more susceptible to the stress of a collective traumatic event. "The people who were talking were probably more distressed by the event," says Seery. "The initial distress motivated them to want to have some place to talk about it...whereas people who chose not to talk were less likely to say that they were trying cope." The take-home message, then, is that there is no one right way to react to traumatic events; there is a wide range of normal and healthy responses to tragedy.

单选题What does the word "ineligible" in par

单选题A study released a little over a week ago, which found that eldest children end up, on average, with slightly higher IQ's than younger siblings, was a reminder that the fight for self-definition starts much earlier than freshman year. Families, whatever the relative intelligence of their members, often treat the firstborn as if he or she were the most academic, and the younger siblings fill in other niches: the wild one, the flirt. These imposed caricatures, in combination with the other labels that accumulate from the sandbox through adolescence, can seem over time like a miserable entourage of identities that can be silenced only with hours of therapy. But there's another way to see these alternate identities: as challenges that can sharpen psychological skills. In a country where reinvention is considered a birthright, many people seem to treat old identities the way Houdini treated padlocked boxes: something to wriggle free from, before being dragged down. And psychological research suggests that this ability can be a sign of mental resilience, of taking control of your own story rather than being trapped by it. The late-night bull sessions in college or at backyard barbecues are at some level like out-of-body experiences, allowing a re-coloring of past experience to connect with new acquaintances. A more obvious outlet to expand identity—and one that's available to those who have not or cannot escape the family and community where they're known and labeled—is the Internet. Admittedly, a lot of the role-playing on the Internet can have a deviant quality. But researchers have found that many people who play life-simulation games, for example, set up the kind of families they would like to have had, even script alternate versions of their own role in the family or in a peer group. Decades ago the psychologist Erik Erickson conceived of middle age as a stage of life defined by a tension between stagnation and generativity-a healthy sense of guiding and nourishing the next generation, of helping the community. Ina series of studies, the Northwestern psychologist Dan P. McAdams has found that adults in their 40s and 50s whose lives show this generous quality—who often volunteer, who have a sense of accomplishment—tell very similar stories about how they came to be who they are. Whether they grew up in rural poverty or with views of Central Park, they told their life stories as series of redemptive lessons. When they failed a grade, they found a wonderful tutor, and later made the honor roll; when fired From a good job, they were forced to start their own business. This similarity in narrative constructions most likely reflects some agency, a willful reshaping and re-imagining of the past that informs the present. These are people who, whether pegged as nerds or rebels or plodders, have taken control of the stories that form their identities. In conversation, people are often willing to hand out thumbnail descriptions of themselves:" I'm kind of a hermit." Or a talker, a practical joker, a striver, a snob, a morning person. But they are more likely to wince when someone else describes them so authoritatively. Maybe that's because they have come too far, shaken off enough old labels already. Like escape artists with a lifetime's experience slipping through chains, they don't want or need any additional work. Because while most people can leave their family niches, schoolyard nicknames and high school reputations behind, they don't ever entirely forget them.

单选题With the spread of inter-active electronic media a man alone in his own home will never have been so well placed to fill the inexplicable mental space between cradle and crematorium. So I suspect that books will be pushed more and more into those moments of travel or difficult defecation (1) people still don't quite know what to do with. When people do read, I think they'll want to feel they are reading literature, or (2) something serious. (3) you're going to find fewer books presenting themselves as no- nonsense and (4) assuming literary pretensions and being packaged as works of art. We can expect an extraordinary variety of genre, but with an underlying (5) of sentiment and vision. Translators can only (6) from this desire for the presumably sophisticated. We can look forward to lots of difficult names and fantastic stories of foreign parts enthusiastically (7) by the overall worship of the "global village" Much of this will be awful and some wonderful, (8) don't expect the press or the organizers of prizes to offer you much help in making the appropriate distinctions. They will be chiefly (9) in creating celebrity, the greatest enemy of discrimination, but a good prop for the (10) consumer. Every ethnic grouping over the world will have to be seen to have a great writer--a phenomenon that will (11) a new kind of provincialism, more chronological than geographic, (12) only the strictly contemporary is talked about and (13) . Universities, including Cambridge, will include (14) their literature syllabus novels written only last year. (15) occasional exhumation for the Nobel, the achievements of ten or only five years ago will be largely forgotten. In short, you can't go too far wrong when predicting more of the same. But there is a (16) side to this--the inevitable reaction against it. The practical things I would like to see happen--publishers seeking less to (17) celebrity through extravagant advertising, (18) and magazines (19) space to reflective pieces--are rather more improbable than the Second Coming (耶稣复临). But dullness never quite darkens the whole planet. In their own idiosyncratic fashion a few writers will (20) be looking for new departures.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} The global reputation of Japan's animation industry -- an animated cartoon industry -- has never been higher, and at first glance it would appear to be in rude health. In the opening weekend of Miyazaki's new film, Howl's Moving Castle, a record 1.1 million Japanese crammed into cinemas nationwide. It has since been seen at home by nearly 10 million people, and has made Japan the only country in which The Incredibles has been kept out of the top slot. Yet Japan's animators are full of gloom. They fear that the future is bleak and that the success enjoyed by Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, which makes his films, is actually masking a sad decline. Indus- try experts say that not only is there a lack of creative talent on a par with Miyazaki, but the overall standard of animators has fallen over the past decade as low pay and poor working conditions force many to quit. "Miyazaki can't be replaced, he's a one-off," says Jonathan Clements, a British animation expert, "Miyazaki isn't 100 per cent of Ghibli, but when he goes, the party is over." The creative and commercial success enjoyed by Ghibli has afforded it a unique breathing space. For other studios, however, commercial pressures force work to be done at breakneck speed and on shoestring budgets. Veterans of the industry say quality has been sacrificed as television cartoon episodes are 'made for as little as ￡ 10,000. Many young animators rely on parental support to put them through animation schools and continue to need financial help just to afford to work in Tokyo, the world's most expensive city. Yet, remarkably, animation has little problem attracting recruits. Dozens of students pore over desks painstakingly producing page after page of drawings. Most say they are aware that pay is low but desperately want to work in the industry they fell in love with as children through cartoons such as Doraemon, the blue talking cat, and Battle of the Planets. But reality often bites as animators reach their thirties, by which time they typically earn around a third of the average pay for Japanese their age and at lower hourly rates than supermarket clerks. Clements believes that the soul of animation is at stake. "Animation is, by definition, from Japan, but it's only a matter of time before the number of foreign contributors tips the balance, and what used to be animation becomes plain old cartoons," he says. "It may ultimately remove much of what makes animation appeal to its current foreign audience base: its exoticism."

单选题 "You are not here to tell me what to do. You are here to tell me why I have done what I have already decided to do," Montagu Norman, the Bank of England's longest-serving governor (1920-1944), is reputed to have once told his economic adviser. Today, thankfully, central banks aim to be more transparent in their decision making, as well as more rational. But achieving either of these things is not always easy. With the most laudable of intentions, the Federal Reserve, America's central bank, may be about to take a step that could backfire. Unlike the Fed, many other central banks have long declared explicit inflation targets and then set interest rates to try to meet these. Some economists have argued that the Fed should do the same. With Alan Greenspan, the Fed's much-respected chairman, due to retire next year-after a mere 18 years in the job-some Fed officials want to adopt a target, presumably to maintain the central bank's credibility in the scary new post-Greenspan era. The Fed discussed such a target at its February meeting, according to minutes published this week. This sounds encouraging. However, the Fed is considering the idea just when some other central banks are beginning to question whether strict inflation targeting really works. At present centra1 banks focus almost exclusively on consumer-price indices. On this measure Mr. Greenspan can boast that inflation remains under control. But some central bankers now argue that the prices of assets, such as houses and shares, should also somehow be taken into account. A broad price index for America which includes house prices is currently running at 5.5%, its fastest pace since 1982. Inflation has simply taken a different form. Should central banks also try to curb increases in such asset prices? Mr. Greenspan continues to insist that monetary policy should not be used to prick asset-price bubbles. Identifying bubbles is difficult, except in retrospect, he says, and interest rates are a blunt weapon: an increase big enough to halt rising prices could trigger a recession. It is better, he says, to wait for a housing or stockmarket bubble to burst and then to cushion the economy by cutting interest rates-as he did in 2001-2002. And yet the risk is not just that asset prices can go swiftly into reverse. As with traditional inflation, surging asset prices also distort price signals and so can cause a misallocation of resources-encouraging too little saving, for example, or too much investment in housing. Surging house prices may therefore argue for higher interest rates than conventional inflation would demand. In other words, strict inflation targeting-the fad of the 1990s-is too crude.

单选题The majority of people, about nine out of ten, are right-handed. (1) until recently, people who were left-handed were considered (2) , and once children showed this tendency they were forced to use their right hands. Today left-handedness is generally (3) , but it is still a disadvantage in a world (4) most people are right-handed. For example, most tools and implements are still (5) for right-handed people. In sports (6) contrast, doing things with the left hand or foot, .is often an advantage. Throwing, kicking, punching or batting from the" (7) "side may result in throwing (8) many opponents who are more accustomed to dealing with the (9) of players who are right-handed. This is why, in many (10) at a professional level, a (11) proportion of players are left-handed than in the population as a whole. The word "right" in many languages means "correct" or is (12) with lawfulness, whereas the words associated (13) "left", such as "sinister", generally have (14) associations. Moreover, among a number of primitive peoples, there is (15) close association between death and the left hand. In the past, in (16) western societies, children were often forced to use their right hands, especially to write with. In some cases the left hand was (17) behind the child's back so that it could not be used. If, in the future, they are allowed to choose, (18) will certainly be more left-handers, and probably (19) people with minor psychological disturbances as a result of being forced to use their (20) hand.

单选题When mentioning "average annual returns" (Paragraph 5), the author is talking about

单选题That Arctic sea ice is disappearing has been known for decades. The underlying cause is believed by all but a handful of climatologists to be global warming brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet the rate the ice is vanishing confuses these climatologists' models. These predict that if the level of carbon dioxide, methane and so on in the atmosphere continues to rise, then the Arctic Ocean will be free of floating summer ice by the end of the century. At current rates of shrinkage, by contrast, this looks likely to happen sometime between 2020 and 2050. The reason is that Arctic air is warming twice as fast as the atmosphere as a whole. Some of the causes of this are understood, but some are not. The darkness of land and water compared with the reflectiveness of snow and ice means that when the latter melt to reveal the former, the area exposed absorbs more heat from the sun and reflects less of it back into space. The result is a feedback loop that accelerates local warming. Such feedback, though, does not completely explain what is happening. Hence the search for other things that might assist the ice's rapid disappearance. One is physical change in the ice itself. Formerly a solid mass that melted and refroze at its edges, it is now thinner, more fractured, and so more liable to melt. But that is (literally and figuratively) a marginal effect. Filling the gap between model and reality may need something besides this. The latest candidates are "short-term climate forcings". These are pollutants, particularly ozone and soot (also called "black carbon") that do not hang around in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide does, but have to be renewed continually if they are to have a lasting effect. If they are so renewed, though, their impact may be as big as CO2's. Reducing soot would not stop the summer sea ice disappearing, but it might delay the process by a decade or two. According to a recent report by the United Nations Environment Program, reducing soot and ozone in the lower part of the atmosphere, especially in the Arctic countries of America, Canada, Russia and Scandinavia, could cut warming in the Arctic by two-thirds over the next three decades. Indeed, the report suggests, if such measures—preventing crop burning and forest fires, cleaning up diesel engines and wood stoves, and so on—were adopted everywhere they could halve the wider rate of wanning by 2050. The rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice, then, illuminates the difficulty of modeling the climate—but not in a way that brings much comfort to those who hope that fears about the future climate might prove exaggerated. When reality is changing faster than theory suggests it should, a certain amount of nervousness is a reasonable response.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Search engine Google was aiming to float on Wall Street this week, valued at up to $ 36 billion. But the Internet company's advisers are meeting this weekend to discuss possibly delaying the public listing after a sharp fall in share prices in New York on Friday. An insider said last night:' "The float is teetering on the brink -- it really is 50/50 at this stage, although many of us are optimistic." The initial public offering (IPO) of shares in Google, which could raise nearly $ 4bn, will amount to one of the biggest IPOs for years. But many US firms have shelved their IPOs amid volatile market conditions and investors appear unwilling to subscribe to new equity. A Wall Street analyst said that the Google IPO "would be a seminal event for the American stock market" as its real significance was that it would test whether or not the recovery in equity prices since the end of the Iraq war had taken hold. "If this float works, a lot of other companies will be encouraged and come to the market later in the year," the insider added. "But it will be bad news if the IPO is pulled or the shares fall sharply after the company is listed. If that happens, it could kill off the IPO market in America and elsewhere for at least 12 months." Several fund managers have already expressed reservations about Google, in particular its high valuation and the complex way the shares are being sold. Moreover, the Google flotation is taking place at a time when technology companies in the US have been shunned. On Thursday, the IPO hit a technical hitch over the failure of the company to meet its legal obligations concerning its employees' stock option plans. But the company did not think that the disclosure would mean a delay to the IPO, which is due on Tuesday. At the top of the suggested price range, Google would be valued not far short of its rival Internet firm Yahoo! -- and this has raised eyebrows within the industry. The auction is being conducted over the Internet, and potential buyers will have to register by signing on to a Google website. But only investors who have brokerage accounts with one of the 28 US banks and brokers underwriting the stock sale, will be able to apply. Google suffered a setback last month after it re- ported an unexpected slowdown in its huge growth rate. But sources close to Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, said that the tailing-off of growth was due to seasonal factors and would not affect the IPO.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Most economists in the United States seem excited by the spell of the free market. Consequently, nothing seems good or normal that does not accord with the requirements of the free market. A price that is determined by the seller or, for that matter, established by anyone other than the aggregate of consumers seems harmful. Accordingly, it requires a major act of will to think of price-fixing (the determination of prices by the Seller) as both "normal" and having a valuable economic function. In fact, price-fixing is normal in all industrialized societies because the industrial system itself provides, as an effortless consequence of its own development, the price-fixing that it requires. Modern industrial planning requires and rewards great size. Hence, a comparatively small number of large firms will be competing for the same group of consumers. That each large firm will act with consideration of its own needs and thus avoid selling its products for more than its competitors charge is commonly recognized by advocates of free-market economic theories. But each large firm will also act with full consideration of the needs that it has in common with the other large firms competing for the same customers. Each large firm will thus avoid significant price-cutting, because price-cutting would be prejudicial to the common interest in a stable demand for products. Most economists do not see price-fixing when it occurs because they expect it to be brought about by a number of explicit agreements among large firms; it is not. Moreover, those economists who argue that allowing the free market to operate without interference is the most efficient method of establishing prices have not considered the economies of non-socialist countries other than the United States. These economies employ intentional price-fixing, usually in an overt fashion. Formal price-fixing by cartel and informal price-fixing by agreements covering the members of an industry are commonplace. Were there something peculiarly efficient about the free market and inefficient about price-fixing, the countries that have avoided the first and used the second would have suffered drastically in their economic development. There is no indication that they have. Socialist industry also works within a framework of controlled prices. In the early 1970's, the Soviet Union began to give firms and industries some of the flexibility in adjusting prices that a more informal evolution has accorded the capitalist system. Economists in the Unites States have hailed the change as a return to the free market. But Soviet firms are no more subject to prices established by a free market over which they exercise little influence than are capitalist firms; rather, Soviet firms have been given the power to fix prices. {{B}}Notes:{{/B}} spell 魔力; 一阵。aggregate 总体。

单选题The history of modern pollution problems shows that most have resulted from negligence and ignorance. We have an appalling tendency to interfere with nature before all of the possible consequences of our actions have been studied in depth. We produce and distribute radioactive substances, synthetic chemicals and many other potent compounds before fully comprehending their effects on living organisms. Our education is dangerously incomplete. It will be argued that the purpose of science is to move into unknown territory, to explore, and to discover. It can be said that similar risks have been taken before, and that these risks are necessary to technological progress. These arguments overlook an important element. In the past, risks taken in the name of scientific progress were restricted to a small place and brief period of time. The effects of the processes we now strive to master are neither localized nor brief. Air pollution covers vast urban areas. Ocean pollutants have been discovered in nearly every part of the world. Synthetic chemicals spread over huge stretches of forest and farmland may remain in the soil for decades and years to come. Radioactive pollutants will be found in the biosphere for generations. The size and persistence of these problems have grown with the expanding power of modern science. One might also argue that the hazards of modern pollutants are small compared with the dangers associated with other human activity. No estimate of the actual harm done by smog, fallout, or chemical residues can obscure the reality that the risks are being taken before being fully understood. The importance of these issues lies in the failure of science to predict and control human intervention into natural processes. The true measure of the danger is represented by the hazards we will encounter if we enter the new age of technology without first evaluating our responsibility to environment.