单选题What really works to make sustainable changes in diet and lifestyle? It"s probably not what you think. Years of clinical research proves that the real keys are pleasure, joy and freedom, not our power of will or austerity (苦行). Joy of living is sustainable; fear of dying is not. Why? Because life is to be enjoyed. There"s no point in giving up something you enjoy unless you get something back that"s even better, and quickly. When people eat more healthfully, exercise, quit smoking, manage stress better, and love more, they find that they feel so much better, so quickly, it reconstruct the reason for making these changes from fear of dying to joy of living. Fortunately, the latest studies show how dynamic and powerful are the mechanisms that control our health and well-being. When you exercise and eat right: Your brain receives more blood flow and oxygen, so you become smarter, think more clearly, have more energy, and need less sleep. Two studies showed that just walking for three hours per week for only three months caused so many new nerve cells to grow that it actually increased the size of people"s brains! Your face receives more blood flow, so your skin glows more and wrinkles less. You look younger and more attractive. In contrast, an unhealthy diet, lasting emotional stress and smoking reduce blood flow to your face so you age more quickly. Smoking accelerate aging because nicotine (尼古丁) causes your blood vessel to become narrower, which decreases blood flow to your face and makes it wrinkle prematurely. This is why smokers look years older than they really are. One of the most interesting findings in this study was that the mothers" perceptions of stress were more important than what was objectively occurring in their lives. The researchers made a survey among women and asked them to rate on a three-point scale how stressed they felt each day, and how out of control their lives felt to them. The women who perceived that they were under heavy stress had significantly shortened and damaged telomeres (染色体端粒) compared with those who felt more relaxed. Conversely, some of the women who felt relaxed despite raising a disabled child had more normal-appearing telomeres. In other words, if you feel stressed, you are stressed.

单选题When Newsweek recently asked 1,000 U. S. citizens to take America's official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn't name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn't correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn't even circle Independence Day on a calendar. Don't get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they've existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. And they've been lamenting the ignorance of their peers ever since pollsters started publishing these dispiriting surveys back in Harry Truman's day. According to a study by Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, the yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World War II have averaged out to "slightly under 1 percent. " But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it's becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us. To appreciate the risks involved, it's important to understand where American ignorance comes from. In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs. The Europeans outdid us. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown us lagging behind our First World peers. Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the U. S. political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. In many European countries, parliaments have proportional representation, and the majority party rules without having to "share power with a lot of subnational governments," notes Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. In contrast, we're saddled with a nonproportional Senate; a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and near-constant elections for every imaginable office (judge, sheriff, school-board member, and so on). "Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote," says Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen. "You know you're going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more. " It doesn't help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, "it's like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn't even speak English. " When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U. S. actually holds its own against Europe. For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed—and they've changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. We suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability. Whether that's a treatable affliction or a terminal illness remains to be seen. But now's the time to start searching for a cure.

单选题When an associate of the Mus6e d'Art Moderne Andr6-Malraux in Normandy flipped through the catalogue for the auction of impressionist art at Sotheby's in New York on November 2nd, he made a startling discovery. On sale was "Blanchisseuses souffrant des dents", a painting by Edgar Degas, which had been stolen in 1973 from a museum where it had been on loan from the Louvre. After being alerted by the French authorities, Sotheby's dropped the painting from the sale. Now an investigation is under way. The owner is likely to lose it without compensation when it is returned to France. Like most art collectors, the owner had no art-title insurance, which would have provided compensation for the painting's value. "Theft accounts for only a quarter of title disputes," says Judith Pearson, a co-founder of ARIS, a small insurance firm that has been selling title insurance since 2006 and which was taken over by Argo Group, a bigger insurer, earlier this month. Three-quarters of squabbles occur in cases of divorce or inheritance. A work of art may also carry liens after being used as a collateral for a loan. More rarely, two or more artists may collaborate but then disagree about who has authority to flog their co-production. Does the risk of title disputes warrant the cost of title insurance? ARIS charges a one-off premium of between 1.75% and 6% of the art's value. In return the company will cover the legal costs in case of a title dispute and compensate for the agreed value of the art if their client loses the ownership dispute. ARIS has so far written about 1,000 policies and has not yet had a claim. An alternative to art-title insurance is for collectors to do due diligence about the provenance of a work of art themselves. Yet many do not have the time or the tools to carry out such research, which is a complex undertaking as there is no central register of art ownership. And even sophisticated collectors get it wrong, as the clients of Salander-O'Reilly, a New York art gallery, discovered. It collapsed spectacularly in 2007 after it emerged that it had dealt in stolen art and defrauded its clients in a Madoffian manner for years. Such cases are exceptional, but as the market booms and the value of art increases, more art lovers will look for additional assurances that their art is really theirs.

单选题According to the text, HDTV

单选题The reluctance of France to accept the global war is due to the fact that

单选题The word "demographers" ( Line 1, Paragraph 7 ) most probably means ______.

单选题Which of the following statements is NOT true about John McDermott?

单选题Our ability to think has long been considered central to what makes us human. Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment (1) even our most abstract thoughts. This includes thinking up random numbers or deciding (2) to review positive or negative experiences. "Advocates of traditional (3) of cognition would be surprised," says Tobias Loetscher at the University of Melbourne in Parkville, Australia. "They (4) consider human reasoning to involve abstract cognitive processes without any connection to body or space." Until recently, the (5) has been that our bodies (6) only to our most basic interactions with the environment, (7) sensory and motor processes. The new results suggest that our bodies are also (8) to produce abstract thought, and that even seemingly (9) activities have the power to influence our thinking. (10) that our bodies may play a role in thought can be found in the metaphors we use to describe situations, (11) "I was given the cold shoulder" or "she has an excellent grasp of relativity". Thirty years ago, such (12) led the linguist and philosopher George Lakoff at the University of Califor- nia, Berkeley, together with philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon in Eugene, to (13) "conceptual metaphor theory", the notion that we think of abstract concepts (14) how our bodies function. Now (15) for the theory has started to (16) in. In 2008, (17) , researchers found that people made to feel socially (18) reported feeling physically colder. Now, Loetscher and his colleagues have (19) our ability to think of random numbers--an example of abstract thought--to bodily (20)

单选题In an age of perpetual digital connectedness, why do people seem so disconnected? In a Duke University study, researchers found that from 1985 to 2004, the percentage of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled, to 25%; the same study found that overall, Americans had one-third fewer friends and confidants than they did two decades ago. Another recent study, by researchers at the University of Michigan, found that college students today have significantly less empathy than students of generations past did. The reason, psychologists speculate, may have something to do with our increasing reliance on digital communication and other forms of new media. It's possible that instead of fostering real friendships off-line, e-mail and social networking may take the place of them—and the distance inherent in screen-only interactions may breed feelings of isolation or a tendency to care less about other people. After all, if you don't feel like dealing with a friend's problem online, all you have to do is log off. The problem is, as empathy wanes, so does trust. And without trust, you can't have a cohesive society. Consider the findings of a new study co-authored by Kevin Rockmann of George Mason University and Gregory Northcraft at the University of Illinois who specializes in workplace collaboration. Northcraft says high-tech communications like e-mail and (to a lesser extent) videoconferencing—which are sometimes known as "lean communication" because they have fewer cues like eye contact and posture for people to rely on—strip away the personal interaction needed to breed trust. In a business setting—as in all other social relationships outside the workplace—trust is a necessary condition for effective cooperation within a group. "Technology has made us much more efficient but much less effective," said Northcraft in a statement. "Something is being gained, but something is being lost. The something gained is time, and the something lost is the quality of relationships. And quality of relationships matters." In Rockmann and Northcraft's study, 200 students were divided into teams and asked to manage two complicated projects: one having to do with nuclear disarmament; the other, price fixing. Some groups communicated via e-mail, some via videoconference and others face to face. In the end, those who met in person showed the most trust and most effective cooperation; those using e-mail were the least able to work together and get the job done. Northcraft thinks this is because real-life meetings, during which participants can see how engaged their colleagues are, breed more trust. Over e-mail, meanwhile, confirmation of hard work gets lost, which tends to encourage mutual slacking off.

单选题It took ______ for the world to increase its population from 1 billion to 4 billion.

单选题Text 1 Among Bloomberg's web pages on April 7th appeared a story that looked ordinary enough: PairGain, an American telecom equipment manufacturer, was to be bought by an Israeli company for about twice its market value. The company's stock price, predictably, rocketed from $8.50 to $11.13. All fine and normal—except that the story wasn't true. Somebody had copied Bloomberg's logo and layout and posted a bogus report on the Bloomberg site. When Pair Gain queried the report, it was taken off, and the share price crashed again. Bloomberg is now suing unnamed parties who posted the page. As more and more of life moves on to the Internet, so the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction on it becomes more and more of a worry. This problem springs from the Internet's central virtue: low barriers to entry. In the real world, being a publisher costs a great deal of money. You have to have manufacturing facilities and distribution networks. So real-world publishers have a great deal invested in their reputations and consequently need to be careful about what they print. On the Internet, being a publisher costs next to nothing. Many Internet publishers, therefore, have little to lose from printing untruths and plenty to gain in notoriety if the story they put out is sensational enough. What's more, faking the real-world newspaper, which has to be both manufactured and distributed, would be next to impossible; faking an Internet page is dead easy. Not all the efforts of the lowering of the barriers to entry are bad. Big, established news organisations can be too cautious and too protective of their more powerful sources. Many scandals have been unearthed first by outsiders with scrappy news sheets and little to lose by way of influential contacts. The Internet is a golden age for what used to be the newsletter. The downside is the ease with which error spreads. Rarely, though, falsehood takes the form of international fraud, more often it appears as malicious gossip, slovenly reporting and Chinese whispers. Last year everybody on the Internet knew that Tommy Hilfiger, a fashion designer, had made racist comments on the Operah Winfrey Show. Except that he didn't. Pierre Salinger, former television newsman, claimed at a news conference that TWA 800, a passenger plane that crashed into the Atlantic killing all aboard in 1996, had been downed by a missile—all on the basis of a web page of dubious origin. Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune wrote her column one week as a spoof graduation speech. Somehow this column became tagged on the web, as Kurt Vonnegut's commencement speech at MIT. Cyberspace can also be risky, for now, because even sophisticated people can be gullible about what they read there. This may be because of a lag between technology and perception. Smartly produced pages, and things on screens, impress us with an authority that springs from the resources needed to produce them in the old paper medium. Perhaps everyone should be more worldly wise about what can turn up on the web.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Most of us have seen a dog staring at, sometimes snarling at, and approaching a reflection of itself. For most animals, seeing their own image in a mirror acts as a social stimulus. But does the dog recognize itself, or does the reflection simply signal a potential companion or threat? This question is interesting for a number of masons. Apart from curiosity about the level of animals' understanding, research on serf- recognition in animals has several benefits. It provides some insight into the evolutionary significance of this skill of serf-recognition and into the level and kinds of cognitive competence that the skill requires. Such research also indicates the kinds of learning experiences that determine the development of self-recognition. In addition, work with animals fosters the use of techniques that are not dependent on verbal responses and that may therefore be suitable for use with preverbal children. The evidence indicates that dogs and almost all other nonhumans do not recognize themselves. In a series of clever experiments, however, Gallup has shown that the chimpanzee does have this capacity. Gallup exposed chimpanzees in a small cage to a full-length mirror for ten consecutive days. It was observed that over this period of time the number of serf-directed responses increased. These behaviors included grooming parts of the body while watching the results, guiding fingers in the mirror, and picking at teeth with the aid of the mirror. Describing one chimp, Gallup said, "Marge used the mirror to play with and inspect the bottom of her feet; she also looked at herself upside down in the mirror while suspended by her feet from the top of the cage; she was also observed to stuff celery leaves up her nose using the mirror for purposes of visually guiding the stems into each nostril." Then the researchers devised a further test of serf-recognition. The chimps were anesthetized and marks were placed over their eyebrows and behind their ears, areas the chimps could not directly observe. The mirror was temporarily removed from the cage, and baseline data regarding their attempts in touch these areas were recorded. The data clearly suggest that chimps do recognize themselves, or are self-aware, for their attempts to touch the marks increased when they viewed themselves. Citing further evidence for this argument, Gallup noted that chimpanzees with no prior mirror experience did not direct behavior to the marks when they were first exposed to the mirror; that is, the other chimpanzees appeared to have remembered what they looked like and do have responded to the marks because they noticed changes in their appearance.

单选题 This time last year three out of four 16 to 24-year-olds were wearing the white band of Make Poverty History. Whatever the campaign may or may not have achieved in Africa, it briefly inspired millions in Britain. A joy, but also a revelation, for this was the moment when I saw how ready people were to take a little bit of action for a big cause. It may also explain how the small movement I helped to found has become a rather large phenomenon. Don't think changing the world can start by something as simple as shutting down your computer at night? Those marching were different crowds from 20 years ago. Make Poverty History made few formal demands. No slogans, no forms, not even meetings if you didn't fancy them. It was activism lite-more a brand than an organization. Show solidarity wherever you go-fashionably of course-do more, if and when you can. The future of active citizenship may depend on understanding why it ignited a generation. If social engagement is a funnel (a tube or pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom) turned on its side, about a quarter of a million people in the UK are at the narrow end, serial activists, responsible for 80 per cent of our community action. Most charities are here, focusing their efforts on these committed citizens. Our organization, We Are What We Do, is at the mouth of the funnel targeted at people who don't recycle or think about fair trade. It is styled as a brand, inspiring people to make the small changes that will make a big difference if enough of us do the same. Our first book-Change the World for a Fiver-featured 50 simple actions, from not spitting out your gum to declining plastic bags. All began by doing something small. Some of the 800 who are buying the book every day remain usefully but lightly engaged. For our new book, Change the World 9 to 5, we decided to focus on the workplace, where most of us spend most of our waking hours. Actions range from the entertaining (smile!); the symbolic (turn off your phone charger when not in use) and the serious (learn to save a life). In working with We Are What We Do I have moved from the view that the sum of individual actions can help to make a difference to the belief that ultimately it is the only thing that ever does. The smallest act has a value of its own.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} You could benefit from flipping through the pages of I Can't Believe You Asked That, a book by author Phillip Milano that's subtitled, A No-Holds-Barred Q & A About Race, Sex, Religion, and Other Terrifying Topics. For the past seven years, Milano--who describes himself as "a straight, white middle class married guy raised in an affluent suburb of Chicago'--has operated yforum, com, a Web site that was created to get us talking. Through the posting of probing, provocative and sometimes simply inane questions and the answers they generate, people are encouraged to have a no-holds-barred exchange on topics across racial, ethnic and cultural lines. More often than not, the questions grow out of our biases and fears and the stereotypes that fuel misunderstanding among us. As with the Web site, Milano hopes his book will be a social and cultural elixir. "The time is right for a new culture of curiosity' to begin to unfold, with people finally breaking clown the {{U}}last barrier{{/U}} to improve race and cultural relations" by actually talking to each other about their differences, Milano said in an e-mail message to me. Milano wisely used the Internet to spark these conversations. In seven years, it has generated 50,000 postings--many of them questions that people find hard to ask in a face-to-face exchange with the subjects of their inquiries. But in his book, which was published earlier this month, Milano gives readers an opportunity to read the questions and a mix of answers that made it onto his Web site. "I am curious about what people who have been blind from birth 'see' in their dreams," a 13-year- old boy wanted to know. "Why do so many mentally disabled people have such poor-looking haircuts and 'nerdy' clothes?" a woman asked. "How do African-Americans perceive God?" a white teenager wanted to know. "Do they pray to a white God or a black God?" Like I said, these questions can generate a range of emotions and reactions. But the point of Milano's Web site, and his book, is not to get people mad, but to inform us "about the lives and experiences" of others. Though many of the answers that people offered to the questions posed in his book are conflicting, these responses are balanced by the comments of experts whose responses to the queries also appear in the book. Getting people to openly say what they are thinking about things that give rise to stereotypes and bigotry has never been easy. Most of us save those conversations for gatherings of people who look or think like us.

单选题Abstract art also called nonobjective art, or nonrepresentational art, is painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays no part. All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract—elements of form, color, line, tone, and texture. Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization—and exposition dominated over expressive function. Abstract art has its origins in the 19th century. The period characterized by so vast a body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual perception. The period of Romanticism had put forward ideas about art that denied classicism's emphasis on imitation and idealization and had instead stressed the role of imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors. Gradually many painters of this period began to accept the new freedom and the new responsibilities implied in the coalescence of these attitudes. Maurice Denis's statement of 1890, "It should be remembered that a picture—before being a war-horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort—is essentially a fiat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order," summarizes the feeling among the Symbolist and Postimpressionist artists of his time. All the major movements of the first two decades of the 20th century, in some way emphasized the gap between art and natural appearances. There is, however, a deep distinction between abstracting from appearances, even if to the point of unrecognizability, and making works of art out of forms not drawn from the visible world. During the several years preceding World War I, such artists as Robert Delaunay and Vladimir Tatlin turned to fundamentally abstract art. (Kandinsky is generally regarded as having been the first modem artist to paint purely abstract pictures containing no recognizable objects.) The majority of even the progressive artist regarded the abandonment of every degree of representation with disfavor, however. During World War I the emergence of the De Stijl group and of the Dada group further widened the spectrum of abstract art. Abstract art did not flourish between World Wars I and II. Beset by totalitarian politics and by art movements placing renewed emphasis on imagery, such as Surrealism, it received little notice. But after World War II an energetic American school of abstract painting called Abstract Expressionism emerged and had wide influence. Since the 1950s abstract art has been an accepted and widely practiced approach within European and American painting and sculpture. Abstract art has puzzled and indeed confused many people, but for those who have accepted its non referential language there is no doubt as to its value and achievements.

单选题The effect of the baby boom on the schools helped to make possible a shift in thinking about the role of public education in the 1920's. In the 1920's, but especially (1) the Depression of the 1930's, the United States experienced a (2) birth rate. Then with the prosperity (3) on by the Second World War and the economic boom that followed it, young people married and (4) households earlier and began to (5) larger families than had their (6) during the Depression. Birth rates rose to 102 per thousand in 1946, 106.2 in 1950, and 118 in 1955. (7) economics was probably the most important (8) , it is not the only explanation for the baby boom. The increased value placed (9) the idea of the family also helps to (10) this rise in birth rates. The baby boomers began streaming (11) the first grade by the mid-1940's and became a (12) by 1950. The public school system suddenly found itself (13) The wartime economy meant that few new schools were buih between 1940 and 1945. (14) , large numbers of teachers left their profession during that period for better-paying jobs elsewhere. (15) , in the 1950's, the baby boom hit an antiquated and inadequate school system. Consequently, the custodial rhetoric of the 1930's no longer made (16) ; keeping youths ages sixteen and older out of the labor market by keeping them in school could no longer be a high (17) for an institution unable to find space and staff to teach younger children. With the baby boom, the focus of educators (18) turned toward the lower grades and back to basic academic skills and (19) . The system no longer had much (20) in offering nontraditional, new, and extra services to older youths.