单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The world is undergoing tremendous changes. The rise of globalization, both an economic and cultural trend that has swept throughout the world, has forged new ground as we enter the 21st century. But are the effects of globalization always positive? Some say no. Michael Tenet, head of the International Institute for Foreign Relations in Atlanta, is worried about current resentment throughout the world toward the rise of globalization. "Ever since the 1980s and the economic collapse of the Asian Tigers in the late 1990s, there has been a re-evaluation of the role of globalization as a force for good," he said. "Incomes in many countries have declined and the gap between the most rich and the most poor has been aggravated. Without further intervention by governments, we could see a tragedy expressed in an increased level of poverty throughout the Latin America and Asia." Yet George Frank, an influential economist who works on Wall Street, sees no such danger. "Economic liberalization, increased transparency and market-based reforms have positive effect in the long run, even if market mechanisms can produce short-term destabilization problems," he said. "What is most important is that barriers to trade continue to fall so that active competition for Consumer goods reduces prices and in turn raises the average level of income." Others feel that globalization's cultural impact may be more important than its economic implications. Janice Yawee, a native of Africa, feels strongly that globalization is undermining her local culture and language. "Most of the world's dialects will become extinct under globalization. We're paving the world with McDonald's and English slang. It tears me up inside," she said. Governments of different countries have had mixed responses to the wave of globalization. The United States is generally seen as an active proponent of greater free trade, and it certainly has enormous cultural influence by virtue of its near monopoly on worldwide entertainment. But other countries, most notably in Europe and developing nations, have sought to reduce the impact that globalization has on their domestic affairs. "When I was a boy we had very little to speak of," says one Singaporean resident. "Now our country has developed into a booming hub for international finance." Others, however, are not so optimistic. "Globalization is an evil force that must be halted," a union official at a car plant in Detroit recently commented, "It's sucking away jobs and killing the spirit of our country." (401 words){{B}}Notes:{{/B}} slang 俚语。tear up 撕碎，挖开。proponent 支持者，拥护者。hub 轮毂。suck away减少。

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. Many professions are associated with a particular stereotype. The classic {{U}}(1) {{/U}} of a writer, for example, is {{U}}(2) {{/U}} a slightly crazy-looking person,{{U}} (3) {{/U}} in an attic, writing away furiously for days {{U}}(4) {{/U}} end. Naturally, he has his favorite pen and note-paper, or a beat-up typewriter, {{U}}(5) {{/U}} which he could not produce a readable word. Nowadays, we know that such images bear little {{U}}(6) {{/U}} to reality. But are they completely {{U}}(7) {{/U}}? In the case of at least one writer, it would seem not. Dame Muriel Spark, who {{U}}(8) {{/U}} 80 in February, in many ways resembles this stereotypical "writer". She is certainly not {{U}}(9) {{/U}}, and she doesn't work in an attic. But she is rather particular {{U}}(10) {{/U}} the tools of her trade. She insists on writing with a {{U}}(11) {{/U}} type of pen in a certain type of notebook, which she buys from a certain stationer in Edinburgh called James Thin. In fact, so {{U}}(12) {{/U}} is she that, if someone uses one of her pens by {{U}}(13) {{/U}}, she immediately throws it away. And she claims she {{U}}(14) {{/U}} enormous difficulty writing in any notebook other than {{U}}(15) {{/U}} sold by James Thin. This could soon be a {{U}}(16) {{/U}}, as the shop no longer stocks them, {{U}}(17) {{/U}} Dame Muriel's supply of 72-page spiral bound is nearly {{U}}(18) {{/U}}. As well as her "obsession" about writing materials, Muriel Spark {{U}}(19) {{/U}} one other characteristic with the stereotypical "writer": her work is the most {{U}}(20) {{/U}} thing in her life. It has stopped her from marrying; cost her old friends and made her new ones, and driven her from London to New York to Rome. Today she lives in the Italian province of Tuscany with a friend.

单选题In the opening paragraph, the author introduces his topic by

单选题As to withstanding the temptations that have sucked male athletes into prima donna poses, which of the following does the author might agree?

单选题According to the author, which of the following is the most important reason for women to go to work?

单选题In 1910, Henry Van Dyke wrote a book called "The Spirit of America, " which opened with this sentence: "The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities— energy. " This has always been true. Americans have always been known for their manic dynamism. Some condemned this ambition as a scrambling after money. Others saw it in loftier terms. But energy has always been the country"s saving feature. So Americans should be especially alert to signs that the country is becoming less vital and assiduous . One of those signs comes to us from the labor market. According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. Part of the problem has to do with human capital. More American men lack the emotional and professional skills they would need to contribute. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 35 percent of those without a high school diploma are out of the labor force, compared with less than 10 percent of those with a college degree. Part of the problem has to do with structural changes in the economy. Sectors like government, health care and high-tech have been growing, generating jobs for college grads. Sectors like manufacturing, agriculture and energy have been getting more productive, but they have not been generating more jobs. Instead, companies are using machines or foreign workers. The result is this: There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical . This is a big problem. It can"t be addressed through the sort of short-term Keynesian stimulus some on the left are still fantasizing about. It can"t be solved by simply reducing the size of government, as some on the right imagine. It will probably require a broad menu of policies attacking the problem all at once: expanding community colleges and online learning; changing the corporate tax code and labor market rules to stimulate investment; adopting German-style labor market practices like apprenticeship programs, wage subsidies and programs that extend benefits to the unemployed for six months as they start small businesses. Reinvigorating the missing fifth—bringing them back into the labor market and using their capabilities—will certainly require money. If this were a smart country, we"d be having a debate about how to shift money from programs that provide comfort and toward programs that spark reinvigoration. But, of course, that"s not what is happening. Discretionary spending, which might be used to instigate dynamism, is declining. Health care spending, which mostly provides comfort to those beyond working years, is expanding. Attempts to take money from health care to open it up for other uses are being crushed . We"re locking in the nation"s wealth into the Medicare program and closing off any possibility that we might do something significant to reinvigorate the missing fifth. Next time you see a politician demagoguing Medicare, ask this : Should we be using our resources in the manner of a nation in decline or one still committed to stoking the energy of its people and continuing its rise?

单选题Most of the illusions that defined the tate global economic boom—the notion that global growth had moved to a non-stop higher plane and housing prices from Miami to Mumbai would rise indefinitely—are now indeed exhausted. Yet one idea still has the power to capture imaginations and markets: it is that commodities like oil, copper, grains and gold are all destined to rise over time. Lots of smart people believe that last year's increase in commodities prices represented a pause in a long-term bull market. It's view rooted in powerful and real trends, like the growth of India, the decline in global reserves, fears over resource nationalization and long-term lack of investment in energy and agriculture, which limits supply. At any point in time, there are always new economic powers emerging on the global scene, yet product prices have continued to fall. The 1980s and 1990s were a relatively strong period for the global economy, and India was growing at an average pace of 7 percent. But prices for most commodities did not follow, oil, for example, never broke through the upper limit of $40 a barrel. The reason oil prices did not spike higher is simple: demand for any product is price-elastic, which means that once the price goes too high, consumers stop buying it or make heroic efforts to find a substitute. There is good reason to believe that the world just passed a similar turning point. The last boom in the oil prices collapsed in 1979, when total spending on oil exceeded 7 percent of global GDP. Last year, spending on oil hit a similar share of global GDP, and the price has since fallen by more than two thirds. Yet markets are still betting that the price of oil is poised to spike again. Some analysts predict $90 a barrel by 2012. It's worth noting that until as recently as 2005, the markets acted on the exact opposite assumption. For years, sport prices ran much higher than futures prices, because most investors assumed prices would follow the historic trend line: down. Today investors are sill reacting to any sign of health in the global economy by pouring money back into commodities, producing the unstable upward price swing we've seen in recent weeks.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Well, he made it up. All of it, apparently. According to a report published on December 29th by Seoul National University in South Korea, its erstwhile employee Hwang Woo-suk, who had tendered his resignation six days earlier, deliberately falsified his data in the paper on human embryonic stem cells that he and 24 colleagues published in Science in May 2005. In particular, Dr Hwang claimed he had created 11 colonies of human embryonic stem cells genetically matched to specific patients. He had already admitted that nine of these were bogus, but had said that this was the result of an honest mistake, and that the other two were still the real McCoy. A panel of experts appointed by the university to investigate the matter, however, disagreed. They found that DNA fingerprint traces conducted on the stem-cell lines reported in the paper had been manipulated to make it seem as if all 11 lines were tailored to specific patients. In fact, none of them matched the volunteers with spinal-cord injuries and diabetes who had donated skin cells for the work. To obtain his promising "results", Dr Hwang had sent for testing two samples from each donor, rather than a sample from the donor and a sample of the cells into which the donor's DNA had supposedly been transplanted. The panel also found that a second claim in the paper-that only 185 eggs were used to create the 11 stem-cell lines-was false. The investigators said the actual number of eggs used was far larger, in the thousands, although they were unable to determine an exact figure. The reason this double fraud is such a blow is that human embryonic stem-cell research has great expectations. Stem cells, which have not yet been programmed to specialise and can thus, in principle, grow into any tissue or organ, could be used to treat illnesses ranging from diabetes to Parkinson's disease. They might even be able to fix spinal-cord injuries. And stem cells cloned from a patient would not be rejected as foreign by his immune system, Dr Hwang's reputation, of course, is in tatters. The university is now investigating two other groundbreaking experiments he claims to have conducted-the creation of the world's first cloned human embryo and the extraction of stem cells from it, and the creation of the world's first cloned dog. He is also in trouble for breaching ethical guidelines by using eggs donated by members of his research team. And it is even possible that the whole farce may have been for nothing. Cloned embryos might be the ideal source of stem cells intended to treat disease, but if it proves too difficult to create them, a rough-and-ready alternative may suffice.

单选题The human Y chromosome—the DNA chunk that makes a man a man—has lost so many genes over evolutionary time that some scientists have suspected it might disappear in 10 million years. But a new study says it'll stick around. Researchers found no sign of gene loss over the past 6 million years, suggesting the chromosome is "doing a pretty good job of maintaining itself," said researcher David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. That agrees with prior mathematical calculations that suggested the rate of gene loss would slow as the chromosome evolved, Page and study co-authors note in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. And, they say, it clashes with what Page called the "imminent demise" idea that says the Y chromosome is doomed to extinction. The Y appeared 300 million years ago and has since eroded into a dinky chromosome, because it lacks the mechanism other chromosomes have to get rid of damaged DNA. So mutations have disabled hundreds of its original genes, causing them to be shed as useless. The Y now contains only 27 genes or families of virtually identical genes. In 2003, Page reported that the modern-day Y has an unusual mechanism to fix about half of its genes and protect them from disappearing. But he said some scientists disagreed with his conclusion. The new paper focuses on a region of the Y chromosome where genes can't be fixed that way. Researchers compared the human and chimpanzee versions of this region. Humans and chimps have been evolving separately for about 6 million years, so scientists reasoned that the comparisons would reveal genes that have become disabled in one species or the other during that time. They found five such genes on the chimp chromosome, but none on the human chromosome, an imbalance Page called surprising. "It looks like there has been little if any gene loss in our own species lineage in the last 6 million years," Page said. That contradicts the idea that the human Y chromosome has continued to lose genes so fast it'll disappear in 10 million years, he said. "I think we can with confidence dismiss … the 'imminent demise' theory," Page said. Jennifer A. Marshall Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra, a gene researcher who argues for eventual extinction of the Y chromosome, called Page's work "beautiful" but said it didn't shake her conviction that the Y is doomed. The only real question is when, not if, the Y chromosome disappears, she said. "It could be a lot shorter than 10 million years, but it could be a lot longer," she said. The Y chromosome has already disappeared in some other animals, and "there's no reason to expect it can't happen to humans," she said. If it happened in people, some other chromosome would probably take over the sex-determining role of the Y, she said.

单选题Henry Kissinger may be the most successful, certainly the most flamboyant, Secretary of State to hold that office in modern times. When he was appointed in the late 1960's, there were no American ties with Communist China, Vietnam and Berlin seemed ready to draw the United States into a third world war, and Russia was seen as "the enemy". But all this has changed, and Henry Kissinger caused much of the change; in 1971, he made his first trip to China, a trip that was the beginning of the current ties between the United States and China. He brought the United States and Russia closer together on major issues by the policy he called "detente", literally meaning a relaxation. His philosophy was always to talk and to bring together. With these two policies, Kissinger did much to draw attention away from any possible Russia-American friction. In 1973 he made his first visit to Egypt. Here he was able to begin U.S. relations with Egypt. He used his contact later to begin the sort of talks that the American press called "shuttle diplomacy". For ninety-nine days, he "shuttled" back and forth on flights between Cairo and Jerusalem to work out a step-by-step withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai desert. His wit, his careful approach to detail, and his presence made "shuttle diplomacy" work. It was the only successful approach to Mid-east peace in the thirty years since the state of Israel was founded. Another major work was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talk. Though his term in office passed with the treaty unsigned, Kissinger left a draft of the treaty to which the Russians had already agreed. The SALT treaty spelled out a one-tenth reduction in nuclear arms, a major accomplishment by any standard, even if one does not consider all the other conditions and limitations included in the treaty. Even though he successfully helped bring an end to the Vietnam War, Kissinger's final days in office were affected, as was the entire executive branch in one way or another, by the scandals of the Nixon White House. Kissinger's critics point to his role in placing wiretaps on the phones of reporters and officials and to what they consider his "high-handed" approach to setting foreign policy. But Kissinger, during the last few months of the Nixon presidency, limited the effects of American domestic problems on our foreign policy. He continued talks in the Middle East. He continued close contact with the Soviet Union. History will decide in the final view, as Kissinger--and many presidents--often said, on the value of his service. Whatever they decide, whether his actions are finally to be considered wise or foolish, he had a personal vision that will he difficult to match.

单选题The examples of GE and Staples in the first paragraph are to show that both companies

单选题In 1998 consumers could purchase virtually anything over the Internet. Books, compact discs, and even stocks were available from World Wide Web Sites that seemed to spring up almost daily. A few years earlier, some people had predicted that consumers accustomed to shopping in stores would be reluctant to buy things that they could not see or touch in person. For a growing number of time-starved consumers, however, shopping from their home computer was proving to be a convenient alternative to driving to the store. A research estimated that in 1998 US consumers would purchase $ 7.3 billion of goods over the Internet, double the 1997 total. Finding a bargain was getting easier, owing to the rise of online auctions and Web sites that did comparison shopping on the Internet for the best deal. For all the consumer interest, retailing in cyberspace was still a largely unprofitable business, however. Internet pioneer Amazon. com, which began selling books in 1995 and later branched into recorded music and videos, posted revenue of $153.7 million in the third quarter, up from $37.9 minion in the same period of 1997. Overall, however, the company's loss widened to $45.2 million from $9.6 million, and analysts did not expect the company to turn a profit until 2001. Despite the great loss, Amazon. com had a stock market value of many billions, reflecting investors' optimism about the future of the industry. Internet retailing appealed to investors because it provided an efficient means for reaching millions of consumers without having the cost of operating conventional stores with their armies of salespeople. Selling online carried its own risks, however. With so many companies competing for consumers' attention, price competition was intense and profit margins thin or nonexistent. One video retailer sold the hit movie Titanic for $9.99, undercutting the $19.99 suggested retail price and losing about $6 on each copy sold. With Internet retailing still in its initial stage; companies seemed willing to absorb such losses in an attempt to establish a dominant market position.

单选题According to the passage, uranium ore is very dangerous because______

单选题 Science and its practical applications in the form of technology, or the "science" of the industrial arts, as Webster defines the term, have had an enormous impact on modem society and culture. For generations it was believed that science and technology would provide the solutions to the problem of human suffering disease, famine, war, and poverty. But today these problems remain; in fact, many argue that they are expanding. Some even conclude that science and technology as presently constituted are not capable of meeting the collective needs of mankind. A more radical position is that modem scientific methods and institutions, because of their very nature and structure, thwart basic human needs and emotions; the catastrophes of today's world, and the greatest threat to its future, some claim, are the direct consequences of science and technology. A major paradox has been created: scientific rationality taken as the supreme form of the application of the rational faculties of human beings and which, along with its practical applications in the form of technological development, have liberated man from ignorance, from the whims and oppressions of a relentless nature and while having subordinated the earth to man, has become the potential instrument of the self-destruction of the human species. War, pollution, and economic oppression are seen as the inevitable results of scientific advance by large sections of the public. The atomic disaster of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are seen as the products of an uninterested scientific rationality. In recent decades in the West there has emerged a wave of anti-scientific, antirational moods, especially among the young people, which threatens a complete rejection not simply of the technological fruits of science, but of scientific rationalism as well, in favor of one or another version of mysticism, irrationalism, and primitivism-or as one philosopher of science has called it, of blood and soil philosophy. Wartovsky has described the argument of the anti-science people as one in which we are warned to "listen to the blood, get back to our roots, and cast out the evil demons of a blind and inhuman rationality, and thereby we will save ourselves". The only "reasonable thing" to do, according to the oppositionist, is to reject reason itself-at least in its scientific form. The very rejection of that reason, in "reasonable" terms, is in itself a paradox.

单选题The first technological revolution in modem biology started when James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of DNA half a century ago. That established the fields of molecular and cell biology, the basis of the biotechnology industry. The sequencing of the human genome nearly a decade ago set off a second revolution which has started to illuminate the origins of diseases. Now the industry is convinced that a third revolution is under way: the convergence of biology and engineering. A recent report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that physical sciences have already been transformed by their adoption of information technology, advanced materials, imaging, nanotechnology and sophisticated modeling and simulation. Phillip Sharp, a Nobel prize-winner at that university, believes that those tools are about to be brought to bear on biology too. But the chances are that this will take time, and turn out to be more of a reformation than a revolution. The conventional health-care systems of the rich world may resist new technologies even as poor countries leapfrog ahead. There is already a backlash against genomics, which has been oversold to consumers as a deterministic science. And given soaring health-care costs, insurers and health systems may not want to adopt new technologies unless inventors can show conclusively that they will produce better outcomes and offer value for money. If these obstacles can be overcome, then the biggest winner will be the patient. In the past medicine has taken a paternalistic stance, with the all-knowing physician dispensing wisdom from on high, but that is becoming increasingly untenable. Digitisation promises to connect doctors not only to everything they need to know about their patients but also to other doctors who have treated similar disorders. That essential reform will enable many other big technological changes to be introduced. Just as important, it can make that information available to the patients too, empowering them to play a bigger part in managing their own health affairs. This is controversial, and with good reason. Many doctors, and some patients, reckon they lack the knowledge to make informed decisions. But patients actually know a great deal about many diseases, especially chronic ones like diabetes and heart problems with which they often live for many years. The best way to deal with those is for individuals to take more responsibility for their own health and prevent problems before they require costly hospital visits. That means putting electronic health records directly into patients" hands.

单选题In Darrah's opinion, people should