单选题The author's overall point is that ______.

单选题Advances in computers and data networks inspire visions of a future "information economy" in which everyone will have (1) to gigabytes of all kinds of information anywhere and anytime, (2) information has always been a (3) difficult commodity to deal with, and, in some ways, computers and high-speed networks make the problems of buying, (4) , and distributing information goods worse (5) better. The evolution of the Internet itself (6) serious problems. (7) the Intemet has been privatized, several companies are (8) to provide the backbones that will carry traffic (9) local networks, but (10) business models for intereonnectinn—who pays how much for each packet (11) , for example—have (12) to be developed. (13) intereonnection standards are developed that make (14) cheap and easy to transmit information across independent networks, competition will (15) . If technical or economic (16) make interconnection difficult, (17) transmitting data across multiple networks is expensive or too slow, the (18) suppliers can offer a signfficant performance (19) ; they may be able to use this edge to drive out competitors and (20) the market.

单选题 A happy life, according to the Scottish poet James Thomson, consists of "retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books," among other things. Alice Munro, perhaps the greatest short-story writer of our time, has elected to embrace this bliss, saying last week, "I'm probably not going to write anymore." An incredulous editor from the National Post had to follow up on whether she really meant it-that last year's sublimely devastating collection, Dear Life, was it for her. "Oh, yes," the 81-year-old Canadian said, telling disappointed fans to "read the old ones over again. There are lots of them." Yet if you have ever imagined a typical day in the life of an author, your vision probably resembles Thomson's. Writing seems like tender labor, and it's not hard to picture all those quarterly Munro stories— the ones that appear in The New Yorker as regularly as fresh interns—being created from a diet of easy grace, fertilized frequently with tea, long walks, dinners on the porch, and Chekhov readings. Why would anyone have to retire from writing, as if it's a job with regular hours? Except it is. John Updike used to rent a one-room office above a restaurant, where he would report to write six days a week. John Cheever famously put on his only suit and rode the elevator with the 9-to-5 crowd, only he would proceed down to the basement to write in a storage room. Robert Caro still puts on a jacket and tie every day and repairs to his 22nd-floor Manhattan office. Authors who corral their duties into daily routines help remind us of the industry of writing. A muse does not pour words into someone's skull. The drudgery has conquered some of our best wordsmiths. "When you decide 'to be a writer, ' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like," Philip Roth, another recent literary retiree, has said about the "stringent exigencies" of literature. "But working at it nearly every day for 50 years ... turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities." He even called it "just torture, awful." Munro has long been able to pensively observe someone and effortlessly penetrate the character's extraordinary private history. "Nobody bothers anymore to judge her goodness," the critic James Wood has said. "Her reputation is like a good address." It is as if she can look upon a person and always see the full span of a life. Now she has taken a measure of her years and judged that, at last, she can stop. Let us read the old ones over again. There are lots of them.

单选题It doesn't take long to get a good feel for the potential of cloud computing and how it can offer ready access to entirely new business capabilities, less expensive IT resources, and unrivaled flexibility for businesses of every size. Since becoming a hot topic early 2008 as major vendors, including top firms such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, jumped on the bandwagon with a wide-range of offerings, cloud computing has consistently stayed on the industry's radar. With leading companies still joining the movement—including IBM, HP, and Salesforce—cloud computing has moved from a cottage industry to one of the bigger growth areas in the computing business, just as the industry as a whole begins to take serious lumps from the recession. The onus is now on businesses to take advantage of cloud computing to cut costs and become more agile. In the process, they will have some hard choices to make—some intriguing ones too—if they want to access the many advantages that cloud computing platforms can provide. There are also some non-trivial challenges involved in adopting cloud computing that must be watched closely as well. These includes a long list of issues such as the security and privacy of business data in remote 3rd party data centers, the dreaded concerns about platform lock-in, worries about reliability and performance, and even fears about making the wrong decision before the industry begins to mature. However, in a business environment where change is almost mandatory in order to survive, cloud computing appears to offer significant economic benefits if the risks can be offset. Hence, one of the bigger challenges IT departments will face this year is whether they can take the plunge with cloud computing quickly enough to benefit their organizations as a whole. Phil Wainewright has covered some of the more interesting issues swirling around cloud computing of late including the default lock-out that occurs in the event of the demise of a cloud computing provider as well as the brewing SLA battles between the major providers. This underscores hew the cloud computing space is where the new platform wars are forming and it's sizing up to be as big or bigger than earlier ones. The good news for now: In a wide-open new industry, there is no clear leader today and choice prevails. This brings up the side discussion of what actually constitutes cloud computing, since everyone seems to be applying the label to anything that runs on the network. Is it Web hosting of your application code? Is it a software platform as an on-demand service? Do SaaS applications count as cloud computing? The answers to all these questions are a qualified yes; the answer hovers roughly around the outsourcing of computing of any kind (CPU, storage, apps, etc.) using a shared cost, commodity utility model. In general, you know if you're involved with cloud computing of some kind if you're receiving a bill for computing services being done for you somewhere else but which you can access directly.

单选题What is the author's attitude towards television?

单选题According to the passage, global warming and climate change might cause

单选题The author discusses the five writers mainly to explain some of their beliefs about

单选题What s the writer' s view about Madonna?

单选题Women, according to Chairman Mao, hold up half the sky—but in California some are better rewarded for this effort than others. According to a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California, Asian women born in the United States outstrip all their sisters in terms of earning power. The average hourly wage for American-born Asian ladies in 2001 (the latest year with reliable figures) was $19.30, with American-born whites coming next. On the bottom rungs of the ladder came Latinas: if born abroad, they earned a mere $10.40 an hour (though this was comfortably above California's then $6.25 minimum wage); if born in America, they managed $15.10 an hour. Education is the biggest reason for the ethnic disparities. Some 55% of California's American-born Asian women have at least a bachelor's degree, and an impressive 84% of them either have jobs or are looking for them. By contrast, only 14% of American-born Hispanic women have a bachelor's degree and only 74% of them are in the labour market. Meanwhile, Latinas born abroad are often condemned to low-paying jobs by an even inefficient education or a poor knowledge of English. Much the same can be said of Asian women born in South-East Asia, a category that includes refugees from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The institute calculates that they earned an average of $15.80, almost $1 less than other foreign-born Asians. But education is not the only factor in play for California's women. Larger families make it more difficult for Latinas to go out to work in the first place; blacks often live too far away to commute to well-paid jobs; and just as Asians may benefit from high expectations, so other groups may suffer from low ones. The institute makes an attempt, heroic or politically correct, to adjust for such factors, imagining, for example, that a foreign-born Latina has the same family structure, education and place of residence as the average Californian woman. That brings the average wage for foreign-born Latinas up to a more respectable $15.20; yet American-born Asians still rule the roost. But before the golden girls get too happy, the institute reckons that Californian women of all sorts tend to earn roughly 20% less than their menfolk do.

单选题 What makes a great high school? Americans think a lot of things do, from outstanding academics or a supportive environment for students to a great football or basketball team. Still, pretty much everyone agrees teaching and learning are central to the mission. High schools are expected to prepare students for further education, work, or the military and eliminate the large gaps in achievement separating different ethnic and income groups of students. These are sensible goals. While there are many great high schools among the nearly 22,000 across the country, too many are still not getting the job done. Only about half of African-American and Hispanic students finish high school on time. Meanwhile, the National Assessment of Education Progress tests, often referred to as "the nation's report card," show significant achievement gaps separating white students from black and Hispanic high school students. These are not small differences but rather vast gaps that crush opportunity and tear at our nation's social contract. Leave aside the intrinsic value of being an educated citizen; there are practical effects as well. In 2005, the mean annual earnings were about ＄20,000 for a high school dropout but ＄54,000 for someone with a bachelor's degree. And those differences are growing wider, not lessening, as our economy becomes more knowledge and skills based. In 1975, a high school dropout earned about half as much as a college graduate, compared with about one third today. This is why U.S. News set some clear criteria for academic quality in its new ranking of American high schools. These criteria mean a lot of schools don't measure up-only 505 schools nationwide earned a silver or gold medal this year. The list illustrates at once the promise and the challenge for high schools today. Only about 1 in 8 of the schools on this list serves a student population that is more than 50 percent low income, and only about 1 in 5 has a majority of nonwhite students. Meanwhile, about 1 in 5 selects students based on academic merit, something that obviously boosts the chances of meeting the criteria. Because the U.S. News list uses more data to judge schools, it paints a clearer picture. Of course, no list is perfect. For instance, it is difficult to account for high school graduation rates because states calculate them in different ways. But this one better reflects what policymakers and parents want from high schools, as well as the challenge our nation faces to make our high schools as good as they need to be.

单选题All men are created equal, or so reckoned Thomas Jefferson as he drafted America's Declaration of Independence in 1776. Subsequent Americans have had reason to question the founding father. So too have people in the land from which the new nation gained its freedom. America and Britain are among the most unequal countries in the rich world and Britain, at any rate, is more unequal now than it was a generation ago. That is the conclusion of a study commissioned by Harriet Harman, the equalities minister. Class and money have always strongly affected how people do in life in Britain, with well-heeled families breeding affluent children just as the offspring of the desperately poor tend to remain poor. All that was supposed to have ceased at the end of the Second World War, with the birth of a welfare state designed to meet basic needs and promote social mobility. But despite devoting much thought and more money to improving the lot of the poor, governments have failed to boost those at the bottom of the pile as much as those at the top have boosted themselves. The new study, led by John Hills of the London School of Economics, found, for example, that the richest tenth of households received income more than four times that of the poorest tenth; just a generation ago, it was three times as much. Internationally, only six of the 30 members of the OECD, a club of mainly rich countries, show greater inequality. Wealth is distributed far more unequally than income, with the richest tenth in Britain holding assets worth almost 100 times those of the poorest. Although the study found that some of the widest gaps between social groups have diminished over time, deep-seated differences between haves and have-nots persist, mining the life chances of the less fortunate. Politicians of all stripes talk up equality of opportunity, arguing that it makes for a fairer and more mobile society, and a more prosperous one. The goal of greater equality of outcomes also has its boosters. In "The Spirit Level", epidemic disease experts Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson claim that more equal societies are healthier than unequal ones, as well as happier. Not all agree, but in a country where the National Health Service accounts for almost a fifth of public spending, it is worth considering. The difficulty arises in putting these notions into practice, through severe tax increases for the middleclass and wealthy, or expanding government intervention. These have not recently been vote-winning propositions, but the recession that Britain is now limping away from may have changed things.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C, and D on ANSWER SHEET 1. The problem to be taken up and the point at which the search for a solution will begin are customarily prescribed by the investigator{{U}} (1) {{/U}}a subject participating in an{{U}} (2) {{/U}}on thinking (or by the programmer for a computer).{{U}} (3) {{/U}}, prevailing techniques of{{U}} (4) {{/U}}in the psychology of thinking have invited{{U}} (5) {{/U}}of the motivational aspects of thinking. The conditions that determine when the person will begin to think in{{U}} (6) {{/U}}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){{U}} (7) {{/U}}are beginning to attract investigation.{{U}} (8) {{/U}}much thinking is aimed at{{U}} (9) {{/U}}ends, special motivational problems are raised by "disinterested" thinking, in which the{{U}} (10) {{/U}}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{{U}} (11) {{/U}}and some formula or set of requirements that{{U}} (12) {{/U}}a solution is what impels continuation of the search and determines the direction it will{{U}} (13) {{/U}}. Neo-behaviorists (like psychoanalysts) have made much of secondary{{U}} (14) {{/U}}value and stimulus generalization; i. e., the tendency of a stimulus pattern to become a source of satisfaction if it resembles or has{{U}} (15) {{/U}}accompanied some form of biological gratification. The insufficiency of this kind of explanation becomes apparent,{{U}} (16) {{/U}}, when the importance of novelty, surprise, complexity, incongruity, ambiguity, and{{U}} (17) {{/U}}is considered. Inconsistency between beliefs, between items of incoming sensory information, or between one's belief and an item of sensory information{{U}} (18) {{/U}}can be a source of discomfort impelling a{{U}} (19) {{/U}}for resolution through reorganization of belief{{U}} (20) {{/U}}or through selective acquisition of new information.

单选题It is implied in the text that the parents' change can be attributed to

单选题It can be learnt from the text that the ruling party in India ______.

单选题From the last paragraph we learn that

单选题When they were children, Terri Schiavo's brother Bobby accidentally locked her in a suitcase. She tried so hard to get out that the suitcase jumped up and down and screamed. The scene predicted, horribly, how she would end, though by that stage she had neither walked nor talked for more than 15 years. By the time she finally died on March 31 st, her body had become a box out of which she could not escape. More than that, it had become a box out of which the United States government, Congress, the president, the governor of Florida and an army of evangelical protestors and bloggers would not let her escape. Her life, whatever its quality, became the property not merely of her husband (who had the legal right to speak for her) and her parents (who had brought her up), but of the courts, the state, and thousands of self-appointed medical and psychological experts across the country. The chief difference between her case and those of Karen Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan, much earlier victims of Persistent Vegetative State (PVS), was the existence of the internet. When posted videotapes showed Mrs Schiavo apparently smiling and communicating with those around her, doctors called these mere reflex activity, but to the layman they seemed to reveal a human being who should not be killed. On March 20th, a CAT scan of Mrs Schiavo's brain-the grey matter of the cerebral cortex more or lass gone, replaced by cerebrospinal fluid-was posted on a biog. By March 29th, it had brought 390 passionate and warring responses. All this outside interference could only exacerbate the real, cruel dilemmas of the case. After a heart attack in February 1990, when she was 26, Mrs Schiavo's brain was deprived of oxygen for five minutes and irreparably damaged. For a while, her family hoped she might be rehabilitated. Her husband Michael bought her new clothes and wheeled her round art galleries, in case her brain could respond. By 1993, he was sure it could not, and when she caught an infection he did not want her treated. Her parents disagreed, and claimed she could recover. From that point the family split, and litigation started. Each side, backed by legions of supporters, accused the other of money-grubbing and bad faith. A Florida court twice ordered Mrs Schiavo's feeding tube to be removed and Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, overruled it. The final removal of the tube, on March 18th, was followed by an extraordinary scene, in the early hours of March 21st, when George Bush signed into law a bill allowing Mrs Schiavo's parents to appeal yet again to a federal court. But by then the courts, and two-thirds of Americans, thought that enough was enough. On March 24th the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.