单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} It is not just Indian software and "business-process outsourcing" firms that are benefiting from the rise of the internet. Indian modern art is also on an upward spiral, driven by the aspirations of newly rich Indians, especially those living abroad, who use the internet to spot paintings and track prices at hundreds of gallery and auction websites. Prices have risen around 20-fold since 2000. particularly for prized names such as Tyeb Mehta and F.N. Souza. There would have been "no chance" of that happening so fast without the internet, says Arun Vadehra, who runs a gallery in Delhi and is an adviser to Christie's, an international auction house. He expects worldwide sales of Indian art, worth $ 200million last year, to double in 2006. It is still a tiny fraction of the $ 30 billion global art market, but is sizeable for an emerging market. For newly rich--often very rich--non-resident Indians, expensive art is a badge of success in a foreign land." Who you are, and what you have, are on your walls," says Lavesh Jagasia, an art dealer in Mumbai. Indian art may also beat other forms of investment. A painting by Mr. Mehta that fetched $ 1.58 million last September would have gone for little more than $ 100 000 just four years ago. And a $ 22million art-investment fund launched in July by Osian's, a big Indian auction house, has grown by 4.1% in its first two months. Scant attention was paid to modern Indian art until the end of the 1990s. Then wealthy Indians, particularly those living abroad, began to take an interest. Dinesh Vazirani, who runs Saffronart, a leading Indian auction site, says 60% of his sales go to buyers overseas. The focus now is on six auctions this month. Two took place in India last week; work by younger artists such as Surendran Naif and Shibu Natesan beat estimates by more than 70%. Sotheby's and Christie's have auctions in New York next week, each with a Tyeb Mehta that is expected to fetch more than $ 1 million. The real question is the fate of other works, including some by Mr. Souza with estimates of up to $ 600 000. If they do well, it will demonstrate that there is strong demand and will pull up prices across the board. This looks like a market with a long way to run.

单选题 The idea of humanoid robots is not new, of course. They have been part of the imaginative landscape ever since Karl Capek, a Czech Writer, first dreamed them up for his 1921 play "Rossum's Universal Robots". (The word "robot" comes from the Czech word for drudgery, robota.) Since then, Hollywood has produced countless variations on the theme, from the sultry False Maria in Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece "Metropolis" to the wittering C3PO in "Star Wars" and the ruthless assassin of "Terminator". Humanoid robots have walked into our collective subconscious, colouring our views of the future. But now Japan's industrial giants are spending billions of yen to make such robots a reality. Their new humanoids represent impressive feats of engineering: when Honda introduced Asimo, a four-foot robot that had been in development for some 15 years, it walked so fluidly that its white, articulated exterior seemed to conceal a human. Honda continues to make the machine faster, friendlier and more agile. Last October, when AMmo was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh, it walked on to the stage and accepted its own plaque. At two and a half feet tall, Sony's QRIO is smaller and more to,like than Asimo. It walks, understands a small number of voice commands, and can navigate on its own. If it falls over, it gets up and resumes where it left off. It can even connect wirelessly to the internet and broadcast what its camera eyes can see. In 2003, Sony demonstrated an upgraded QRIO that could run. Honda responded last December with a version of Asimo that runs at twice the speed. In 2004, Toyota joined the fray with its own family of robots, called Partner, one of which is a four-foot humanoid that plays the trumpet. Its fingers work the instrument's valves, and it has mechanical lungs and artificial lips. Toyota hopes to offer a commercial version of the robot by 2010. This month, 50 Partner robots will act as guides at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. Despite their sudden proliferation, however, humanoids are still a mechanical minority. Most of the world's robots are faceless, footless and mute. They are bolted to the floors of factories, stamping out car parts or welding pieces of metal, machines making more machines. According to the United Nations, business orders for industrial robots jumped 18% in the first half of 2004. They may soon be outnumbered by domestic robots, such as self-navigating vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and window washers, which are selling fast. But neither industrial nor domestic robots are humanoid.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Guthrie's contiguity principle offers practical suggestions for how to break habits. One application of the threshold method involves the time young children spend on academic activities. Young children have short attention spans, so the length of time they can sustain work on one activity is limited. Most activities are scheduled to last no longer than 30 to 40 minutes. However, at the start of the school year, attention spans quickly wane and behavior problems often result. To apply Guthrie's theory, a teacher might, at the start of the year, limit activities to 15 to 20 minutes. Over the next few weeks the teacher could gradually increase the time students spend working on a single activity. The threshold method also can be applied to teaching printing and handwriting. When children first learn to form letters, their movements are awkward and they lack fine motor coordination. The distances between lines on a page are purposely wide so children can fit the letters into the space. If paper with narrow lines is initially introduced, students' etters would spill over the borders and students might become frustrated. Once students can form letters within the larger borders, they can use paper with smaller borders to help them refine their skills. The fatigue method can be applied when disciplining disruptive students who build paper airplanes and sail them across the room. The teacher can remove the students from the classroom, give them a large stack of paper, and tell him to start making paper airplanes. After the students have made several airplanes, the activity should lose its attraction and paper will become a cue for not building airplanes. Some students continually race around the gym when they first enter their physical education class. To employ the fatigue method, the teacher might decide to have these students continue to run a few more laps after the class has begun. The incompatible response method can be used with students who talk and misbehave in the media center. Reading is incompatible with talking. The media center teacher might ask the students to find interesting books and read them while in the center. Assuming that the students find the books enjoyable, the media center will, over time, become a cue for selecting and reading books rather than for talking with other students. In a social studies class some students regularly fall asleep. The teacher realized that using the board and overhead projector while lecturing was very boring. Soon the teacher began to incorporate other elements into each lesson, such as experiments, and debates, in an attempt to involve students and raise their interest in the course.

单选题In some countries, societal and familial treatment of the elderly usually reflects a great degree of independence and individualism. Their financial support is often provided by social security or welfare systems which decrease dependence on their family. Additionally, older people may seek their own friends rather than become too emotionally dependent on their children. Senior citizens centers provide a means for peer-group association within one's own age groups. There are problems, however, with growing old, in the United States. Glorification of youth and indifference to the aged have left many older people alienated and alone. Some families send their older relatives to nursing homes rather than integrate them into the homes of the children or grandchildren. This separation of the elderly from the young has contributed to the isolation of an increasingly large segment of society. On the other hand, there are many older people who choose to live in retirement communities where they have the companionship of other older people and convenience of many recreational and social activities close home. The treatment of the elderly can be further understood by distinguishing between nuclear and extended family structures. In the United States the nuclear family, which consists of the father, the mother, and the children, is considered "the family". The extended family, common in other cultures, includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and children in law. The distinction between the nuclear and extended family is important because it suggests the extent of family ties and obligations. In extended families the children and parents have strong ties and obligations to relatives. It is common in these families to support older family members, to have intensive contact with relatives, and to establish communal housing. The American nuclear family usually has its own separate residence and is economically independent of other family members. Relatives are still considered "family" but are often outside the basic obligations that people have to their immediate families. When couples many, they are expected to live independently of their parents and become "heads of households" when they have children. It is not unusual in times of financial need for nuclear family members to borrow money from a bank rather than from relatives. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, then, are not directly involved in the same way as they would be in an extended family structure.

单选题According to the passage which of the following occurred prior to 1890.9

单选题What have the Handlins argued about the relationship between racial prejudice and the institution of legal slavery in the English colonies of North America?

单选题George Bernard Shaw once wrote: "There is no love sincerer than the love of food. "That love has limits, however. In thin years, diners value their wallets over their palates. Visits to posh restaurants in America declined by 15 % between May 2008 and May this year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. Fast-food restaurants, on the other hand, saw traffic decline only 2%. To lure eaters back, many fine restaurants have done what luxury brands hate to do: have a cut-price sale. Some offer discounts to those who dine at unpopular times, such as early in the evening or on Sunday. Restaurant Week, a twice-yearly tradition in New York City where restaurants offer discounted prix-fixed menus at lunch and dinner, was extended by six weeks this summer. This may help. The 21 Club, a fancy joint in Manhattan, usually sees its business increase by around 25%～40% during Restaurant Week, says Bryan McGuire, its general manager. Many restaurants have also turned to the Internet. Gilt and Rue La La, two popular online shopping sites that offer heavy discounts on designer clothing, have started to peddle meals at fancy restaurants too. Gilt, for example, recently sold a four-course meal at the Tribeca Grill, a restaurant owned by Robert De Niro, an actor, for $160 (36% off). Shopping sites like these attract image-conscious restaurants, because only the site's members can see that the restaurant has started to offer leaner prices. Another website, Groupon, has gained popularity among restaurants as a way to bring in new customers. The company offers a daily discount in each of the 140 American and European cities where it operates. Some 40% of its promotions are for restaurants. The deals can be generous: some offer $50-worth of food and wine for $25. The deal only goes into effect, however, if enough people buy it. So people prod their Facebook friends to join the feeding frenzy. This type of "collective buying" has caught on. Since the firm started in 2008, it has brokered the sale of more than 8.8m "groupons" and saved customers around $375m. La Condesa, a restaurant in Austin, has sold 3,000 groupons. " It brings a lot of people into the restaurant who would never have come in," says Jesse Herman, an executive. Tasty offerings abound online. OpenTable, a website, allows people to book a table without having to plead with a snooty hostess. It also makes it easier for restaurants to track customers. SeamlessWeb allows people in America and Britain to search online for nearby eateries and order their food delivered. Even swanky restaurants have started to take part, betting that some people might want to eat haute cuisine without dressing for the occasion. But SeamlessWeb takes a cut of restaurants' sales for bringing them business, so restaurants have to decide whether' it's better to stay hungry for customers or share part of their meal with someone else.

单选题It"s no surprise that Jennifer Senior"s insightful, provocative magazine cover story, "I love My Children, I Hate My Life," is arousing much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that "the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight." The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive—and newly single—mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual "Jennifer Aniston is pregnant" news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity morn, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands. In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn"t seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the childless. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn"t have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives. Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their "own" (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake. It"s hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it"s interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren"t in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting "the Rachel" might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.

单选题The essential function of photosynthesis in terms of plant needs is______

单选题Which of the following, according to the text, is true?

单选题 If soldiering was for the money, the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS) would have disintegrated in recent years. Such has been the explosion in private military companies (PMCs) that they employ an estimated 30,000 in Iraq alone—and no government can match their fat salaries. A young SAS trooper earns about ￡ 2,000 ($3,500 ) a month; on the "circuit", as soldiers call the private world, he could get ￡ 15,000. Why would he not'? For reasons both warm-hearted and cool-headed. First, for love of regiment and comrades, bonds that tend to be tightest in the most select units. Second, for the operational support, notably field medicine, and the security, including life assurance and pension, that come with the queen's paltry shilling. Although there has been no haemorrhaging of special force (SF) fighters to the private sector, there has been enough of a trickle to cause official unease. A memo recently circulated in the Ministry of Defence detailed the loss of 24 SF senior non-commissioned officers to private companies in the past year. All had completed 22 years of service, and so were eligible for a full pension, and near the end of their careers. Yet there is now a shortage of hard-bitten veterans to fill training and other jobs earmarked for them, under a system for retaining them known as "continuance." America has responded to the problem by throwing cash at it, offering incentives of up to $150,000 to sign new contracts. The Ministry of Defence has found a cheaper ploy. It has spread the story of two British PMC employees, recently killed in Iraq, whose bodies were left rotting in the sun.

单选题In a department store, the purpose of showing clients bait priced items is to ______.

单选题The author gives a detailed explanation of the examples of the Asian engineer and the Japanese manager to show

单选题Generally speaking, a British is widely regarded as a quiet, shy and conservative person who is (1) only among those with whom he is acquainted. When a stranger is at present, he often seems nervous, even (2) . You have to take a commuter train any morning or evening to (3) the truth of this. Serious-looking businessmen and women sit reading their newspapers or dozing in a corner; hardly anybody talks, since to do so would be considered quite (4) . (5) , there is an unwritten but clearly understood code of behavior which, once broken, makes the offender immediately the object of (6) . It has been known as a fact that a British has a (7) for the discussion of their weather and that, if given a chance, he will talk about it (8) . Some people argue that it is because the British weather seldom (9) forecast and hence becomes a source of interest and (10) to everyone. This may be so. (11) a British cannot have much (12) in the weathermen, who, after promising fine, sunny weather for the following day, are often proved wrong (13) a cloud over the Atlantic brings rainy weather to all districts! The man in the street seems to be as accurate — or as inaccurate — as the weathermen in his (14) . Foreigners may be surprised at the number of references (15) weather that the British (16) to each other in the course of a single day. Very often conversational greetings are (17) by comments on the weather. “Nice day, isn’t it?” “Beautiful!” may well be heard instead of “Good morning, how are you?” Although the foreigner may consider this exaggerated and comic, it is (18) .pointing out that it could be used to his advantage. If he wants to start a conversation with a British but is at a loss to know (19) to begin, he could do well to mention the state of the weather. It is a safe subject which will (20) an answer from even the most reserved of the British.

单选题The author thinks of the explanation given by the army as______