单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} You cannot buy Prada shoes on Prada. com. In fact, there are no working links on the Web site. This is not a technical disorder. Since the late' 9Os, the site has been a single page, with only the name of the Italian fashion house and two photographs. No store locations or help numbers. Nothing. "I love Prada," ponders Nina Dietzel, president of Web-design company 300FeetOut. "But what's up with their 'site' ?" Prada claims a new Web site is "under development." But having a mysteriously useless home page, it admits, has an allure. It screams exclusivity: you can see, but you can't click. It's a uniquely Prada solution to this riddle: how to make your luxury brand work on the Internet without diminishing its value. In a sense, the Internet is antithetical to the "high touch" luxury experience. There is no indulgence by sales staff, and customers have come to see the Net as a path to cheap prices, not top-dollar goods. There's no velvet rope: anyone can place an order, or set up shop. That's why Prada strives to maintain the link between its name and the extravagant experience of shopping at stores like its $ 40 million New York flagship, designed by Rem Koolhaas. Unlike Prada, most luxury companies can't afford to ignore the Web: in the United States, ecommerce accounted for $ 2.5 billion in luxury sales. That figure is expected to grow to $ 7 billion by 2010, says Forrester Research. It's still a small fraction of the total market compared to other retail sectors, but five years ago analysts said there was "no way" luxury would sell online. They were betting customers wouldn't pay that much on the Web, and top brands wouldn't go slumming in this bargain basement. One of the first high-end luxury retailers, Ashford. com, had many well-publicized struggles, with its stock dropping to near rock bottom in 2001. Companies like Neiman Marcus that have strong catalog sales have made the transition to the Web more easily; online sales are the company's fastest-growing source of revenue. Swiss watchmakers Breitling and Patek Philippe have taken another tack with Web sites that offer only information, not sales. Breitling director of marketing Ben Balmer says a luxury brand needs to offer "a buying experience" that only a well-run store can provide. However, he notes that since 2002, it has presented 30 percent fewer catalogs in the United States, and seen sales rise more than 35 percent, thanks to exposure on the Internet. Prada may not need a working Web site after all.

单选题A proven method for effective textbook reading is the SQ3R method developed by Francis Robinson. The first step is to survey (the S step) the chapter by reading the title, introduction, section headings, summary and by studying any graphs, tables, illustrations or charts. The purpose of this step is to get an overview of the chapter so that you will know before you read what it will be about. In the second step (the Q step), for each section you ask yourself questions such as "What do I already know about this topic?" and "What do I want to know?" In this step you also take the section heading and turn it into a question. This step gives you a purpose for reading the section. The third step (the first of the 3 R's) is to read to find the answer to your questions. Then at the end of each section, before going on to the next section, you recite (the second of the 3 R's) the answers to the questions that you formed in the question step. When you recite you should say the information you want to learn out loud in your own words. The fifth step is done after you have completed steps 2, 3 and 4 for each section. You review (the last of the 3 R's) the entire chapter. The review is done much as the survey was in the first step. As you review, hold a mental conversation with yourself as you recite the information you selected as important to learn. The mental conversation could take the form of asking and answering the questions fromed from the headings or reading the summary, which lists the main ideas in the chapter, and trying to fill in the details for each main idea.

单选题The narration of the European model in the second Paragraph implies that

单选题The Nicaragua Sign Language is__________.

单选题The more chemicals we send into the air, the less land we will possibly have because

单选题By quoting Whitman in paragraph 2, the author intends to

单选题It can be learned from Paragraph 4 that

单选题Which of the following is closest in meaning to the word "clumsiness" ?

单选题Which one of the following statements would supporters of the "nature" theory agree with?

单选题The author wants to write ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Few beyond California' s technology crowd recognise the name Larry Sonsini; none within its circle could fail to. For four decades he has been lawyer, adviser and friend to many prominent companies and investors. Some consider him the most powerful person in Silicon Valley. Companies beg for his law firm to represent them. The 65-year-old chairman of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and more recently, as outside counsel to Hewlett-Packard (HP), for initially defending the board's dubious investigative practices. WSG&R boasts 600 lawyers and represents around half of Silicon Valley's public companies, including Apple? Sun Microsystems and Google. Last year it ranked first in private-equity and venture-capital deals, with nearly twice as many as its closest rival. Over the past five years WSG&R has worked on over 1 000 mergers and acquisitions, collectively worth over $ 260 billion. The recent troubles cast a shadow over WSG&R's reputation. Although Mr. Sonsini is not accused of wrongdoing himself, many of his firm's clients are on the ropes. Former executives at Brocade Communications suffered criminal charges in July, Mr. Sonsini Served on Brocade's board until last year and his firm was its outside counsel. He also was on the boards of Pixar, Echelon, Lattice Semiconductor, LSI Logic and Novell all firms at which the issuing of stock options is being called into question. WSG&R dismisses the idea that Mr. Sonsini faced a conflict of interest by acting as both director and legal adviser to so many firms and says he did not advise HP in its investigation of board members. Mr. Sonsini initially said it was "well done and within legal limits". It now seems it was neither.

单选题What does the underlined word "unearth" mean?

单选题The author implies that many employee health insurance plans

单选题It has long been the subject of speculation among the police and criminologists: what would happen if all the officers who now spend so much of their time taking statements, profiling criminals and moving pieces of paper around were suddenly put on the streets? Crime figures released by London's Metropolitan Police this week provide the best answer yet. Following the bombings of July 7th and 21st, thousands of police officers materialised on London's pavements, many of them sporting brightly coloured jackets. Drawn from all over the city, they were assigned to guard potential targets such as railway stations. The police presence was especially heavy in the bombed boroughs: Camden (which was struck three times), Hammersmith and Fulham, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Westminster and the City of London. The show of force did not just scare off terrorists. There was less crime in July than in May or June, which is unusual: the warmer month tends to bring out criminal tendencies, as windows are left open and alcohol is imbibed alfresco. But the chilling effect was much stronger in the six boroughs that were targeted by terrorists. There, overall crime was down by 12% compared with July 2004.In inner London as a whole, crime fell by 6%. But in outer London, where the blue line was thinner, it went up slightly. Simon Foy, who tracks such trends at the Metropolitan Police, says that crime fell particularly steeply on the days of the attacks, partly because of the overwhelming police presence and partly because "even criminals were watching their televisions". What is significant is that crime barely rose thereafter. That was a change from the aftermath of September 11th 2001, when crime quickly soared just about everywhere—possibly because officers were deployed only in the very centre of London. "The received wisdom among criminologists is that marginal changes invisible patrolling have little or no effect on crime," says Mike Hough, a criminologist at King's College London. July's experiment should put that argument to rest. Even if offenders do not make rational calculations about the odds of being caught—which was low both before and after the bombings—they will be moved by a display of overwhelming force.