单选题The author mentions Hardy's novel "Under the Greenwood Tree" to justify his comments on

单选题According to the author, the function of the structured-inquiry method is

单选题In Smith's view, monopolies

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Joseph Rykwert entered his field when post-war modernist architecture was coming under fire for its alienating embodiment of outmoded social ideals. Think of the UN building in New York. the city of Brasilia. the UNESCO building in Paris, the blocks of housing "projects" throughout the world. These tall. uniform boxes are set back from the street, isolated by windswept plazas. They look inward to their own functions, presenting no "face" to the inhabitants of the city, no "place" for social interaction. For Mr. Rykwert. who rejects the functionalist spirit of the Athens Charter of 1933. a manifesto for much post-war building, such facelessness destroys the human meaning of the city. Architectural form should not rigidly follow function, but ought to reflect the needs of the social body it represents. Like other forms of representation, architecture is the embodiment of the decisions that go into its making, not the result of impersonal forces, market or history. Therefore. says Mr. Rykwert, adapting Joseph de Maistre's dictum that a nation has the government it deserves, our cities have the faces they deserve. In this book. Mr. Rykwert. a noted urban historian of anthropological love, offers a flaneur's approach to the city's exterior surface rather than an urban history from the conceptual inside out. He does not drive, so his interaction with the city affords him a warts-and-all view with a sensual grasp of what it is to be a "place". His story of urbanization begins, not surprisingly, with the industrial revolution when populations shifted and increased, exacerbating problems of housing and crime. In the 19th century many planning programs and utopias (Ebenezer Howard's garden city and Charles Fourier's "phalansteries" among them) were proposed as remedies. These have left their mark on 20th-century cities, as did Baron Hausmann's boulevards in Paris, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc's and Owen Jones's arguments for historical style, and Adolf Loos's fateful turn-of-the-century call to abolish ornament which, in turn, inspired Le Corbusier's bare functionalism. The reader will recognize all these ideas in the surfaces of the cities that hosted them: New York. Paris. London, and Vienna. Cities changed again after the Second World War as populations grew. technology raced and prosperity spread. Like it or not, today's cities are the muddled product, among other things, of speed. greed, outmoded social agendas and ill-suited postmodern aesthetics. Some lament the old city's death; others welcome its replacement by the electronically driven "global village". Mr, Rykwert has his worries, to be sure. but he does not see ruin or chaos everywhere. He defends the city as a human and social necessity. In Chandigarh, Canberra and New York he sees overall success; in New Delhi, Paris and Shanghai, large areas of falling. For Mr. Rykwert. a man on foot in the age of speeding virtual, good architecture may still show us a face where flaneurs can read the story of their urban setting in familiar metaphors.

单选题Stelios' record is listed in order to show that

单选题The most important reason wily the Bush administration support more new nuclear power plants is that ______.

单选题Eco-tourism—travel that preserves the environment and promotes the welfare of local people— continues to gain force. Impressed by the success of countries like Costa Rica and Ecuador, which have lured flocks of travelers for mountain treks and jungle safaris, a growing number of regions across tile globe are turning to eco-tourism as a strategy' for economic growth. Omar Bongo, the president of Gabon, a developing country in west central Africa, bas set aside about 10 percent of the country's landmass for 13 national parks. Green Visions, a tourism and environment protection company, based in Sarajevo. Bosnia-Herzegovina, is pioneering an eco-tourism development plan in Central Europe with "green adventures" that promote environmental principles and support local businesses. Even Greece, better known for its pumping night life and archaeological monuments, devotes a section of its national tourism' Web site to "Greek nature" and eco-tourism. Over the last four years, at least 48 countries, from Puerto Rico to Portugal, have created or started to define a national strategy for eco-tourism development, according to a 2004 eco-tourism report by Mintel International Group, a market-research company based in Britain. Though eco-tourism has long conjured images of biodiversity hot spots in countries like Belize, parts of the United States are starting to embrace the trend too. For example, the Wisconsin Department of Tourism will begin testing a new certification program in March called Travel Green Wisconsin. Designed to encourage hotels and tour operators to reduce their environmental impact, the program is aimed at protecting the natural areas that play a significant role in defining the state as a tourist destination. If. successful, the program will be rolled out statewide next year. For businesses, eco-friendly initiatives not only offer marketing advantages but can help with the bottom line. Hotels can cut costs by doing everything from installing energy-saving light bulbs to asking travelers to reuse their towels. And some 58.5 million U.S. travelers, or 38 percent, would pay more to use travel companies that strive to protect and preserve the environment, according to a study by the Travel Industry Association of America sponsored by National Geographic Traveler. Of those travelers. 61 percent said they would pay 5 to 10 percent more to use such companies. However. selecting among the growing number of eco-friendly choices can be frightening, especially given the ever-broadening category, which now encompasses everything from basic campsites to high-end mountain lodges, lama trekking to motorcycle tours through the jungle. Enter the Sustainable Tourism Certification Network of the Americas—a partnership of certification programs, environmental groups, government organizations and others, led by the Rainforest. Alliance and the International Ecotourism Society—which aims to promote sustainability and higher environmental and social standards for tourism. In September, the network designed a series of baseline criteria for certification to help generate credibility among members and promote local conservation. This year, the document will be put up for public consultation before being fully ratified. "Certification is a way for us to avoid green washing," the practice of promoting something as ecotourism while behaving in an environmentally irresponsible way, said Ronald Sanabria. director of sustainable tourism at the Rainforest Alliance. "Certification for us is a tool to avoid that and to ensure third-party assessments of requirements and really prove the company./

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Germany's chimney sweeps—hallowed as bringers of good luck, with their black top hats and coiled-wire brushes— are under attack. Last week the European Commission's directorate for the internal market revived proceedings against an antiquated German law that protects sweeps against competition. The country's chimney sweeps enjoy a near-perfect monopoly. Germany is divided into around 8000 districts, each ruled by its own master sweep who usually employs two more sweeps. Although this is a private enterprise, the maintenance and inspection service provided is compulsory and prices are set by the local authority: sweeps cannot stray outside their district, nor can householders change their sweep even if they loathe him. This rule cuts both ways. "There are some customers I can't stand either," says one Frankfurt sweep. The rationale is simple: chimney-sweeping and related gas and heating maintenance in Germany are treated as a matter of public safety. Annual or semi-annual visits are prescribed, keeping the sweeps busy all year round. For centuries, chimney-sweeps in Europe were a wandering breed. But in 1937 the chimney-sweep law was revised by Heinrich Himmler, then the acting interior minister. His roles tied chimney sweeps to their districts and decreed that they should be German, to enable him to use sweeps as local spies. The law was updated in 1969, leaving the local monopolies in place but opening up the profession, in theory at least, to non-Germ, ans. But in practice few apply. Four years ago a brave Pole qualified as a master in Kaiserslautern, according to a fellow student, and this year an Italian did so in the Rhineland Palatinate. But he, like most newly qualified German masters, will spend years on a waiting list before he gets his own district. The European Commission would like to see a competitive market in which people can choose their own sweeps, just as they choose builders or plumbers. It first opened infringement proceedings in 2003, and the German government of the time promised to change the law but failed to do so. And despite the huffing and puffing from Brussels, tile government is still reluctant to dismantle its antiquated system on safety grounds. The number of deaths from carbon-monoxide poisoning in Germany is around one-tenth that in France or Belgium, claims the Frankfurt sweep. So Germans are likely to be stock with their neighbourhood Schornsteinfegers—whether they can stand each other or not—for some time to come.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The period of adolescence, i.e., the period between childhood and adulthood, may be long or short, depending on social expectations and on society's definition as to what constitutes maturity and adulthood. In primitive societies adolescence is frequently a relatively short period of time, while in industrial societies with patterns of prolonged education coupled with laws against child labor, the period of adolescence is much longer and may include most of the second decade of one's life. Furthermore, the length of the adolescent period and the definition of adulthood status may change in a given society as social and economic conditions change. Examples of this type of change are the disappearance of the frontier in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the United States, and more universally, the industrialization of an agricultural society. In modern society, ceremonies for adolescence have lost their formal recognition and symbolic significance and there no longer is agreement as to what constitutes initiation ceremonies. Social ones have been replaced by a sequence of steps that lead to increased recognition and social status. For example, grade school graduation, high school graduation and college graduation constitute such a sequence, and while each step implies certain behavioral changes and social recognition, the significance of each depends on the socio-economic status and the educational ambition of the individual. Ceremonies for adolescence have also been replaced by legal definitions of status roles, rights, privileges and responsibilities. It is during the nine years from the twelfth birthday to the twenty-first that the protective and restrictive aspects of childhood and minor status are removed and adult privileges and responsibilities axe granted. The twelve-year-old is no longer considered a child and has to pay full fare for train, airplane, theater and movie tickets. Basically, the individual at this age loses childhood privileges without gaining significant adult rights. At the age of sixteen the adolescent is granted certain adult rights which increases his social status by providing him with more freedom and choices. He now can obtain a driver's license: he can leave public schools; and he can work without the restrictions of child labor laws. At the age of eighteen the law provides adult responsibilities as well as rights: the young man can now be a soldier, but he also can marry without parental permission. At the age of twenty-one the individual obtains his full legal rights as an adult. He now can vote, he can buy liquor, he can enter into financial contracts, and he is entitled to run for public office. No additional basic rights are acquired as a function of age after majority status has been attained. None of these legal provisions determine at what point adulthood has been reached but they do point to the prolonged period of adolescence.

单选题Of greatest interest to those concerned with the environmental aspects of solid waste management is the issue of—and the need for—resource recovery and recycling. To many Americans, there is perhaps no greater symbol of our imbalance with nature and our mal-adaptation to its realities than the fact that we discard millions of tons of wastes every year which do, in act, have value. The American people realize now that trash need not be mere junk. It has the potential of becoming a significant vein or resources, a mother lode of opportunity for men of vision who can see beyond the horizon. The American people are right. And those who serve them can no longer view solid waste management solely in terms of collection and disposal. However, something more than the magic of science and technology is required to convert all this waste back into useful resources. In fact, in proportion to consumption, resource: recovery has been steadily losing ground in recent years in virtually every materials sector. Approximately 200 million tons of paper, iron, steel, glass, nonferrous metals, textiles, rubber and plastics flow through the economy yearly--and materials weighing roughly the same leave the economy again as waste. In spite of neighbor hood recycling projects, container recovery depots, paper drives, anti-litter campaigns, local ordinances banning the non-returnable bottle, and file emergence of valuable new technological approaches, only a trickle of the "effluence of affluence" is today being diverted from the municipal waste stream. The principal obstacles are economic and institutional, not technological. The cost of recovering, processing and transporting wastes is so high that the resulting products simply cannot compete, economically, with virgin materials. Of course, it the true costs of such economic "externalities" as environmental impact associated with virgin materials use were reflected in production costs and if there were no subsidies to virgin materials in the form of depletion allowances and favorable freight rates, the use of secondary materials would become muck more attractive. But they are not now. There are no economic or technical events on the horizon, short of governmental intervention, that would indicate a reversal of this trend. If allowed to continue to operate as it does now, the economic system will continue to select virgin raw materials in preference to wastes. This fact should be etched into the awareness of those who look to recycling as a way out of the solid waste management dilemma.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Every newborn baby is dealt a hand of cards which helps to determine how long he or she will be allowed to play the game of life. Good cards will help those who have them to have a long and healthy existence, while bad cards will bring to those who have them terrible diseases like high blood pressure and heart disease. Occasionally, cards are dealt out that doom their holders to an early death. In the past, people never knew exactly which cards they had been dealt. They could guess at the future only by looking at the kind of health problems experienced by their parents or grandparents. Genetic testing, which makes it possible to find dangerous genes, has changed all this. But, until recently, if you were tested positive for a bad gene you were not obliged to reveal this to anyone else except in a few extreme circumstances. This month, however, Britain became the first country in the world to allow life insurers to ask for test results. So far, approval has been given only for a test for a fatal brain disorder known as Huntington’s disease. But ten other tests (for seven diseases) are already in use and are awaiting similar approval. The independent body that gives approval, the Department of Health’s genetics and insurance committee, does not have to decide whether the use of genetic information in insurance is ethical. It must judge only whether the tests are reliable to insurers. In the case of Huntington’s disease the answer is clear-cut. People unlucky enough to have this gene will die early, and cost life insurers dearly. This is only the start. Clear-cut genetic answers, where a gene is simply and directly related to a person’s risk of death, are uncommon. More usually, a group of genes is associated with the risk of developing a common disease, dependent on the presence of other genetic or environmental factors. But, as tests improve, it will become possible to predict whether or not a particular individual is at risk. In the next few years researchers will discover more and more about the functions of individual genes and what health risks — or benefits — are associated with them.

单选题The idea is as audacious as it altruistic: provide a personal laptop computer to every schoolchild—particularly in the poorest parts of the world. The first step to making that happen is whittling the price down to $100. And that is the goal of a group of American techno-gurus led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the fabled MIT Media Lab. When he unveiled the idea at the World Economic Forum in January it seemed wildly ambitious. But surprisingly, it is starting to become a reality. Mr. Negroponte plans to display the first prototype in November at a UN summit. Four countries—Brazil, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa—have said they will buy over 1 m units each. Production is due to start in late 2006. How is the group, called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), able to create a laptop so inexpensively? It is mainly a matter of cleverly combining existing technologies in new ways. The laptop will have a basic processor made by AMD, flash memory instead of a hard disk, will be powered by batteries or a hand- crank, and will run open-source software. The $100 laptop also puts all the components behind the screen, not under the keyboard, so there is no need for an expensive hinge. So far, OLPC has got the price down to around $130. But good news for the world's poor, may not be such great news for the world's computer manufacturers. The new machine is not simply of interest in the developing world. On September 22nd, Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, said the state should purchase one for every secondary-school student, when they become available. Sales to schools are just one way in which the $100 laptop could change the computer industry more broadly. By depressing prices and fuelling the trend for "good-enough computing", where customers upgrade less often, it could eventually put pressure on the world's biggest PC-makers.

单选题The deal agreed on Thursday looks promising in that ______.