单选题The work of a completely uneducated farmer is as important as a professor because______.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Recent years have brought minority-owned businesses in the United States unprecedented opportunities--as well as new and significant risks. Civil right activists have long argued that one of the principal reasons why Blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups have difficulty establishing themselves in business is that they lack of access to the sizable orders and subcontracts that are generated by large companies. Now Congress, in apparent agreement, has required by law that businesses awarded federal contracts of more than ＄500,000 do their best to find minority subcontractors and record their efforts to do so on forms filed with the government. Indeed, some federal and local agencies have gone so far as to set specific percentage goals for apportioning parts of public works contracts to minority enterprises. Corporate response appears to have been substantial. According to figures collected in 1977, the total of corporate contracts with minority businesses rose from ＄77 million in 1972 to 1.1 billion in 1977. The projected total of corporate contracts with minority businesses for the early 1980's is estimated to be over ＄ 3 billion per year with no letup anticipated in the next decade. Promising as it is for minority businesses, this increased patronage poses dangers for them, too. First, minority firms risk expanding too fast and overextending themselves financially, since most are small concerns and, unlike large businesses, they often need to make substantial investment in new plants, staff, equipment and the like in order to perform work subcontracted to them. If, thereafter, their subcontracts are for some reason reduced, such firms can face potentially crippling fixed expenses. The world of corporate purchasing can be frustrating for small entrepreneurs who get requests for elaborate formal estimates and bids. Both consume valuable time and resources, and a small company's efforts must soon result in orders, or both the morale and the financial health of the business will suffer. A second risk is that White-owned companies may seek to cash in on the increasing apportionment through formation of joint ventures with minority-owned concerns. Of course, in many instances there are legitimate reasons for joint ventures; clearly, White and minority enterprises can team up to acquire business that neither could acquire alone. But civil right groups and minority business owners have complained to Congress about minorities being set up as "fronts" with White backing, rather than being accepted as full partners in legitimate joint ventures. Third, a minority enterprise that secures the business of one large corporate customer often runs the danger of becoming and remaining dependent. Even in the best of circumstances, fierce competition from larger, more established companies makes it difficult for small concerns to broaden their customer bases; when such firms have nearly guaranteed orders from a single corporate benefactor, they may truly have to struggle against complacency arising from their current success. (469 words){{B}}Notes:{{/B}} civil rights activists 公民权利激进分子。Hispanics 西班牙后裔美国人。sizable orders 大额订单。subcontract 转包合同。on forms filed with the government 在政府存档备案。percentage goals 指标。apportionment 分配，分派。public works 市政工程。letup 减弱，缓和。promising as it is...这是as引导的让步状语从句，表语倒装了。patronage 优惠。concern n.公司。and the like 以及诸如此类的。crippling fixed expenses 引起损失的固定开支。the world of 大量的。bid 投标。to cash in on...靠……赚钱。team up 一起工作，合作。"fronts" 在此处意为“摆门面”。complacency 自满。

单选题By the fourth week of July conditions in the tropics were such that ______.

单选题Narrative crept back into art through a side door marked fashion photography. In April 1967, French Vogue published a spread by Bob Richardson, the American photographer, that soon became a legend Informally christened " the Greek trip " by Richardson's admirers, the spread featured Donna Mitchell, a striking brunet model, hanging out on the Aegean island of Rhodes with a male companion. Of course, narrative never disappeared—it just went to the movies, and stayed, and stayed. But what had caused stories to be exiled from high art? The idea of essence, and the equation of essence with goodness. Can you imagine? Visual art is essentially composed of form, color, materials. Anything to do with content is extraneous and therefore to be associated with badness; therefore to be eliminated. Moreover, content, says this line of thought, is controlling. This means that a rose is the Virgin Mary (depending on what the meaning of " is " is). And art, like society, must be liberated from such hierarchically imposed values. What this argument overlooked, of course, is that narrative is a form in itself, not just a vehicle for content. Indeed, the ideology of formalism originated, in Soviet Russia, with the analysis of old folk tales. Narrative form, the analysis went, typically proceeds from an initial state of equilibrium through a series of destabilizing episodes, concluding with a heightened state of equilibrium at the end. Think Indiana Jones. You can plug whatever content you want in there as long as it creates the form. Each episode simply has to do with the work of creating disequilibrium. A narrative does not, in other words, tell a story. A story is told to give listeners the pleasure of the narrative form. If you were to isolate the form of disequilibrium from the specifics of plot, you might arrive at something resembling the collected work of Cindy Sherman. Initially modeled after movie stills, Sherman's pictures are not, of course, abstract. Over the years, in fact, their content has become increasingly elaborate. I see this as a form of generosity as well as a sign of advanced technical skills. Not since Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), perhaps, has an artist contrived to turn the human figure into a more bountiful cornucopia for the eye. Yet even the most visually splendid of Sherman's images are minimalist, in that they reduce the narrative down to the precise moment when the center of gravity shifts. Perhaps some unheard word is spoken. A floorboard squeaks. From upstairs comes a thump. And a tentative state of equilibrium gives way to anxiety or dread. That moment, too, represents essence. What more do you need to know?

单选题For Tony Blair, home is a messy sort of place, where the prime minister's job is not to uphold eternal values but to force through some unpopular changes that may make the country work a bit better. The area where this is most obvious, and where it matters most, is the public services. Mr Blair faces a difficulty here which is partly of his own making. By focusing his last election campaign on the need to improve hospitals, schools, transport and policing, he built up expectations. Mr Blair has said many times that reforms in the way the public services work need to go alongside increases in cash. Mr Blair has made his task harder by committing a classic negotiating error. Instead of extracting concessions from the other side before promising his own, he has pledged himself to higher spending on public services without getting a commitment to change from the unions. Why, given that this pledge has been made, should the health unions give ground in return? In a speech on March 20th, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, said that "the something-for-nothing days are over in our public services and there can be no blank cheques." But the government already seems to have given health workers a blank cheque. Nor are other ministries conveying quite the same message as the treasury. On March 19th, John Hutton, a health minister, announced that cleaners and catering staff in new privately-funded hospitals working for the National Health service will still be government employees, entitled to the same pay and conditions as other health-service workers. Since one of the main ways in which the government hopes to reform the public sector is by using private providers, and since one of the main ways in which private providers are likely to be able to save money is by cutting labor costs, this move seems to undermine the government's strategy. Now the government faces its hardest fight. The police need reforming more than any other public service. Half of them, for instance, retire early, at a cost of ￡1 billion (＄1.4% billion) a year to the taxpayer. The police have voted 10--1 against proposals from the home secretary, David Blunkett, to reform their working practices. This is a fight the government has to win. If the police get away with it, other public-service workers will reckon they can too. And, if they all get away it, Mr Blair's domestic policy--which is what voters are most likely to judge him on a the next election--will be a failure.

单选题What has the author never understood?

单选题At the beginning of the century, medical scientists made a surprising discovery: that we are (1) not just of flesh and blood but also of time. They were able to (2) that we all have an internal "body clock" which (3) the rise and fall of our body energies, making us different from one day to the (5) . These forces became known as biorhythms: they create the (5) in our everyday life. The (6) of an internal "body clock" should not be too surprising, (7) the lives of most living things are dominated by the 24-hour night-and-day cycle. The most obvious (8) of this cycle is the (9) we feel tired and fall asleep at night and become awake and (10) during the day. (11) the 24-hour rhythm is interrupted, most people experience unpleasant side effects. (12) , international aeroplane travelers often experience "jet lag" when traveling across time (13) . People who are not used to (14) work can find that lack of sleep affects their work performance. (15) the daily rhythm of sleeping and waking, we also have other rhythms which (16) .longer than one day and which influence wide areas of our lives. Most of us would agree that we feel good on (17) days and net so good on others. Sometimes we are (18) fingers and thumbs but on other days we have excellent coordination. There are times when we appear to be accident-prone, or when our temper seems to be on a short fuse. Isn't it also strange (19) ideas seem to flow on some days but at other times are (20) nonexistent? Musicians, painters and writers often talk about "dry spells".

单选题 The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may seem innocuous—so much so that many consumers do it with no questions asked. Yet that one action can set in motion a cascade of silent events, as that data point is acquired, analyzed, categorized, stored and sold over and over again. Future attacks on your privacy may come from anywhere, from anyone with money to purchase that phone number you surrendered. If you doubt the multiplier effect, consider your e-mail inbox. If it's loaded with spam, it's undoubtedly because at some point in time you unknowingly surrendered your e-mail to the wrong Web site. Do you think your telephone number or address are handled differently? A cottage industry of small companies with names you've probably never heard of—like Acxiom or Merlin—buy and sell your personal information the way other commodities like corn or cattle futures are bartered. You may think your cell phone is unlisted, but if you've ever ordered a pizza, it might not be. Merlin is one of many commercial data brokers that advertises sale of unlisted phone numbers compiled from various sources—including pizza delivery companies. These unintended, unpredictable consequences that flow from simple actions make privacy issues difficult to grasp, and grapple with. In a larger sense, privacy also is often cast as a tale of "Big Brother"—the government is watching you or a big corporation is watching you. But privacy issues don't necessarily involve large faceless institutions: A spouse takes a casual glance at her husband's Blackberry, a co-worker looks at e-mail over your shoulder or a friend glances at a cell phone text message from the next seat on the bus. While very little of this is news to anyone—people are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere—there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft. And polls and studies have repeatedly shown that Americans are indifferent to privacy concerns. The general defense for such indifference is summed up a single phrase: "I have nothing to hide. " If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn't the government be able to peek at your phone records, your wife see your e-mail or a company send you junk mail? It's a powerful argument, one that privacy advocates spend considerable time discussing and strategizing over. It is hard to deny, however, that people behave different when they're being watched. And it is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history.

单选题To which of the following is the author most likely to agree?

单选题Virtually everything astronomers know about objects outside the solar system is based on the detection of photons-quanta of electromagnetic radiation. Yet there is another form of radiation that permeates the universe: neutrinos. With (as its name implies) no electric charge, and negligible mass, the neutrino interacts with other particles so rarely that a neutrino can cross the entire universe, even traversing substantial aggregations of matter, without being absorbed or even deflected. Neutrinos can thus escape from regions of space where light and other kinds of electromagnetic radiation are blocked by matter. Not a single, validated observation of an extraterrestrial neutrino has so far been produced despite the construction of a string of elaborate observatories, mounted on the earth from Southern India to Utah to South Africa. However, the detection of extraterrestrial neutrinos are of great significance in the study of astronomy. Neutrinos carry with Their information about the site and circumstances of their production; therefore, the detection of cosmic neutrinos could provide new information about a wide variety of cosmic phenomena and about the history of the universe. How can scientists detect a particle that interacts so infrequently with other matter? Twenty-five years passed between Pauli's hypothesis that the neutrino existed and its actual detection; since then virtually all research with neutrinos has been with neutrinos created artificially in large particle accelerators and studied under neutrino microscopes. But a neutrino telescope, capable of detecting cosmic neutrinos, is difficult to construct. No apparatus can detect neutrinos unless it is extremely massive, because great mass is synonymous with huge numbers of nucleons (neutrons and protons), and the more massive the detector, the greater the probability of one of its nucleon's reacting with a neutrino. In addition, the apparatus must be sufficiently shielded from the interfering effects of other particles. Fortunately, a group of astrophysicists has proposed a means of detecting cosmic neutrinos by harnessing the mass of the ocean. Named DUMAND, for Deep Underwater Muon and Neutrino Detector, the project calls for placing an array of light sensors at a depth of five kilometers under the ocean surface. The detecting medium is the sea water itself: when a neutrino interacts with a particle in an atom of seawater, the result is a cascade of electrically charged particles and a flash of light that can be detected by the sensors. The five kilometers of seawater above the sensors will shield them from the interfering effects of other high-energy particles raining down through the atmosphere. The strongest motivation for the DUMAND project is that it will exploit an important source of information about the universe. The extension of astronomy from visible light to radio waves to x-rays and gamma rays never failed to lead to the discovery of unusual objects such as radio galaxies, quasars, and pulsars. Each of these discoveries came as a surprise. Neutrino astronomy will doubtlessly bring its own share of surprises.

单选题Which of the following is NOT correct according to the third paragraph?

单选题According to Geoff Stewart, the high court's decision will ______.