单选题In an effort to __________ culture shocks, I think there is value in knowing something about the nature of culture.
单选题Mary finally decided ______ all the junk she had kept in the garage.
单选题There was snow everywhere, so that the shape of things was difficult to ______. (2010年四川大学考博试题)
单选题The doctor took X-rays to ______ the chance of broken bones.
单选题The boy students in this school are nearly ______ as the girl students to say they intend to get a college degree in business.
单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} There are 5 reading passages in this part. Each passage
is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there
are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice and
mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding letter in
the brackets.{{B}}Passage 1{{/B}}
While the polltakers are most widely
known for their political surveys, the greatest part of their work is on behalf
of American business. There are three kinds of commercial surveys. One is
a public relations research, such as that done for banks, which finds out how
the public feels about a company. Another is employee-attitude research, which
learns from rank-and-file workers how they really feel about their jobs and
their bosses, and which can avert strikes by getting to the bottom of grievances
quickly. The third, and probably most spectacular, is marketing research,
testing public receptivity to products and designs. The investment a company
must make for a new product is enormous--$ 5,000,000 to $10,000,000, for
instance, for just one new product. Through the surveys a company can discover
in advance what objections the public has to competing products, and whether it
really wants a new one. These surveys are actually a new set of signals
permitting better communication between business and the general public--letting
them talk to each other. Such communication is vital in a complex society like
our own. Without it, we would have not only tremendous waste but the industrial
anarchy of countless new unwanted products appearing and
disappearing.
单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}}
Doctors at Stanford University are
studying a medication they hope will alleviate the suffering of millions of
American women. But their target isn't breast cancer, osteoporosis, or a
similarly well-known affliction. Despite its alarming impact on its victims, the
malady in question has received comparatively little medical scrutiny. It's a
"hidden epidemic," according to the Stanford researchers: compulsive shopping
disorder. That's right. What was once merely a punchline in
television sitcoms is now being taken seriously by many clinicians. According to
the Stanford study's leader, Dr. Lorrin Koran, compulsive shopping is "motivated
by 'irresistible' impulses, characterized by spending that is excessive and
inappropriate, has harmful consequences for the individual, and tends to be
chronic and stereotyped." Compulsive shoppers "binge buy" --most often clothes,
shoes, makeup, and jewelry--and then suffer intense guilt. That, in turn, helps
trigger another frenzied trip to the mall, and the cycle continues.
Could compulsive shopping be a health hazard associated with America's
unparalleled economic prosperity? "It seems to be a disease of affluence,"
says Dr. Jerrold Pollak, a clinical psychologist who's treated several
shopaholics. "Advertisers... would like us to think that shopping is a reason to
live," agrees Dr. Cheryl Carmin, another clinical psychologist. "If you do not
have the time or inclination to go to the mall or grocery store, there are
catalogs, delivery services, home shopping networks on TV, and endless items to
buy via the Internet." Indeed, this year, US advertisers will spend $ 233
billion--an amount equal to six federal education budgets to persuade Americans
to buy, buy, buy. Yet the possibility that US advertisers may be
driving certain women in our society t9 psychosis is only part of the story. It
seems that the pharmaceutical companies' quest to cure the effects of excessive
marketing may itself be little more than a cleverly-disguised marketing scheme.
The Stanford study, like many of its kind, is being funded by a pharmaceutical
company. The undisclosed drug is an FDA-approved antidepressant, specifically an
SSRI--a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. (The researchers are also
studying behavioral therapies for compulsive shoppers.) The
researchers running the Stanford study refused to reveal their sponsor. However,
only five SSRIs are currently on the US market. Pfizer (makers of Zolofi), Eli
Billy (Prozac) and SmithKline Beecham (Paxil) all reported that they are neither
conducting nor planning any studies of their drugs for compulsive shopping.
Solvay (Luvox)also seems an unlikely candidate. In 1997, researchers at the
University of Iowa tried using Luvox to treat compulsive shoppers and found no
measurable differences between the effects of the drug and those of a placebo.
Perhaps the manufacturers of Luvox want to give their product another shot. More
likely, however, the mysterious benefactor of the Stanford Study is Forest
Pharmaceuticals (Celexa). Their PR department neither confirmed nor denied any
involvement in Koran's study. Why would a pharmaceutical company
anonymously spend money to license one of its top-selling drugs for a marginal
disorder like compulsive shopping? A big part of the answer is profit. The
mystery company presumably hopes to carve a unique slice out of the mental
disorder pie in order to market it together with a ready-made treatment. This is
not at all a new strategy for the world's mammoth pharmaceutical firms, as David
Healy, a professor at the University of Wales College of Medicine, explains in
his book "The Anti- Depressant Em." Healy's book describes a process by which
companies Seek to "educate" both patients and clinicians about a new disorder,
to sell the disorder in preparation for selling its cure. Funding clinical
trials is a crucial part of that process.
单选题What accounts for the great outburst of major inventions in early America-breakthroughs such as the telegraph, the steamboat and the weaving machine?
Among the many shaping factors, I would single out the country"s excellent elementary schools; a labor force that welcomed the new technology; the practice of giving premiums to inventors; and above all the American genius for nonverbal, "spatial" thinking about things technological.
Why mention the elementary schools? Because thanks to these schools our early mechanics, especially in the New England and Middle Atlantic states, were generally literate and at home in arithmetic and in some aspects of geometry and trigonometry.
Acute foreign observers related American adaptiveness and inventiveness to this educational advantage. As a member of a British commission visiting here in 1853 reported, "With a mind prepared by thorough school discipline, the American boy develops rapidly into the skilled workman."
A further stimulus to invention came from the "premium" system, which preceded our patent system and for years ran parallel with it. This approach, originated abroad, offered inventors medals, cash prizes and other incentives.
In the United States, multitudes of premiums for new devices were awarded at country fairs and at the industrial fairs in major cities. Americans flocked to these fairs to admire the new machines and thus to renew their faith in the beneficence of technological advance.
Given this optimistic approach to technological innovation, the American worker took readily to that special kind of nonverbal thinking required in mechanical technology. As Eugene Ferguson has pointed out, "A technologist thinks about objects that cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in his mind by a visual, nonverbal process... The designer and the inventor...are able to assemble and manipulate in their minds devices that as yet do not exist."
This nonverbal "spatial" thinking can be just as creative as painting and writing. Robert Fulton once wrote, "The mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc., like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as an exhibition of his thoughts, in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea."
When all these shaping forces—schools, open attitudes, the premium system, a genius for spatial thinking—interacted with one another on the rich U.S. mainland, they produced that American characteristic, emulation. Today that word implies mere imitation. But in earlier times it meant a friendly but competitive striving for fame and excellence.
单选题It's never easy for a mighty military to tread lightly on foreign soil. In the case of American forces in South Korea, protectors of the nation's sovereignty since the Korean War, the job is made doubly difficult by local sensitivities arising from a history of foreign domination. So when a few GIs commit particularly brutal crimes against the local populace, it's easy for some South Koreans to ask: Who will guard us from our guardians? That kind of questioning grew more insistent on January 20, when police found the body of a 30year-old Korean woman, Kang Un-gyong, in the apartment she shared with her American. boyfriend. An autopsy showed Kang, who had bruises over most of her face and chest, died after being hit on the back of her head with a blunt object. Her boyfriend, Henry Kevin McKinley, 36, an electrician at the United States military base in Seoul, admitted heating her. McKinley said he pushed Kang, who then struck her head on a radiator, but denied that he tried to murder her. On January 21 McKinley was arrested on charges similar to involuntary manslaughter under Korean law. As a civilian employee of the U.S. military in Korea, he comes under the purview of the Status-of-Forces agreement between Washington and Seoul. This grants the South Korean government criminal jurisdiction——but not pre-trial custody——over members of American forces in Korea. Because of the gravity of the charges against McKinley, however, the Americans waived their rights to keep him in their custody before trial. The Kang case was only the latest in a series of crimes involving members of U.S. forces and Koreans. Just a few days earlier, a U.S. army sergeant was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting a local in a subway brawl last May——even though some reports said it was a Korean who instigated tile fray. The murder also followed two separate incidents in which American soldiers were indicted on charges of attempted rape. With the spotlight already on the behaviour of American servicemen abroad because of the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Okinawa, allegedly by a group of U.S. soldiers, the Kang murder burst the lid on many Koreans' resentment of the presence of 37,000 American troops in their midst. Official relations between Seoul and Washington remain on an even keel, and most Koreans don't blame the entire U.S. military for the crimes of individual servicemen. But the incidents have played into the hands of those who are questioning the very basis of the American presence in South Korea. Some observers believe the weds of Koreans' estrangement from the U.S. military were first sown in 1980, when troops under the control of former President Chun Doo Hwan massacred some 200 pro-democracy protesters in the southern city of Kwangju. Many left-wing students——usually at the forefront of anti-government protests——still insist that the U.S. military command acquiesced in the crackdown. But public alienation against U.S. troops really took off after the brutal 1992 murder of a Korean prostitute by an American soldier. Pictures taken at the time-not released publicly but seen by the REVIEW-showed the dead woman's mouth stuffed with matches and a bottle stuck in her vagina. The man convicted of the murder, Pvt. Kenneth Markle of the U. S. army's 2nd Division, received a life sentence, later reduced to 15 years. Cultural misunderstandings haven't helped matters any. Many Koreans believe all Gls are mist young men with little education from rural areas of the U.S. "I've been hit and called names by Koreans, but I didn't respond," says a soldier at Camp Humphreys in Pyongtaek. He says the U.S. forces' command "drills it into your head every day: don't fight with a Korean. You can't win." Other factors are also at play, not least the swelling self-confidence of the younger generation of South Koreans, bolstered by their nation's growing economic and political clout. "Once upon a time we needed help from the U.S., and American economic and military aid was very important to Korea," says Nam Chan Soon, a journalist at the Dong A llbo newspaper, "But now times have changed." While the U.S. command recognizes the need to respect Korean sensitivities, its hard for the Americans to keep a low profile. One reason: The main U.S. military base in Korea is in the Itae-won district——in the very heart of Seoul. Plans to move the base to another location have been put off because of budget constraints.
单选题You're ______ your time trying to persuade him; he' II never help you.
单选题Passage 3 What do consumers really want? That's a question market researchers would love to answer. But since people don't always say what they think, marketers would need direct access to consumers' thoughts to get the truth. Now, in a way, that is possible. At the "Mind of the Market" laboratory at Harvard Business School, researchers are looking inside shoppers' skulls to develop more effective advertisements and marketing pitches. Using imaging techniques that measure blood flow to various parts of the brain, the Harvard team hopes to predict how consumers will react to particular products and to discover the most effective ways to present information. Stephen Kosslyn, a professor of psychology at Harvard, and business school professor Gerald Zaltman, oversee the lab. "The goal is not to manipulate people's preferences," says Kosslyn, "just to speak to their actual desires. "The group's findings, though still preliminary, could radically change how firms develop and market new products. The Harvard group use position emission topography (PET) scans to monitor the brain activity. These PET scans, along with other non-invasive imaging techniques; enable researchers to see which parts of the brain are active during specific tasks (such as remembering a word). Correlations have been found between blood flow to specific areas and future behavior. Because of this, Harvard researchers believe the scans can also predict future purchasing patterns. According to an unpublished paper the group produced, "It is possible to use these techniques to predict not only whether people will remember and have specific emotional reactions to certain materials, but also whether they will be inclined to want those materials months later. " The Harvard group is now moving into the next stage of experiments. They will explore how people remember advertisements as part of an effort to predict how they will react to a product after having seen an ad. The researchers believe that once key areas of the brain are identified, scans on about two dozen volunteers will be enough to draw conclusions about the reactions of specific segments of the population. Large corporations — including Coca Cola, Eastman Kodak, General Motors, and Hallmark — have already signed up to fund further investigations. For their financial support, these firms gain access to the experiments, but cannot control them. If Kosslyn and Zaltman and their team really can read the mind of the market, then consumers may find it even harder to get those advertising jingles out of their heads.
单选题{{B}}Passage Two{{/B}}
To what extent are the unemployed
failing in their duty to society to work, and how far has the State an
obligation to ensure that they have work to do? It is by now
increasingly recognized that workers may be thrown out of work by industrial
forces beyond their control, and that the unemployed are in some sense paying
the price of the economic progress of the rest of the community. But concern
with unemployment and the unemployed varies sharply. The issues of duty and
responsibility were reopened and revitalized by the unemployment scare of
1971-1972. Rising unemployment and increased sums paid out in benefits to the
workless had reawakened controversies which had been inactive during most of the
period of fuller employment since the war ended the Depression. It looked as
though in future there would again be too little work to go round, so there were
arguments about how to produce more work, how the available work should be
shared out, and who was responsible for unemployment and the
unemployed. In 1972 there were critics who said that the State's
action in allowing unemployment to rise was a faithless act, a breaking of the
social contract between society and the worker. Yet in the main any contribution
by employers to unemployment such as lying off workers in order to introduce
technological changes and maximize profits tended to be ignored. And it was the
unemployed who were accused of failing to honor the social contract, by not
fulfilling their duty to society to work. In spite of general concern at the
scale to the unemployment statistics, when the unemployed were considered as
individuals, they tended to attract scorn and threats of punishment. Their
capacities and motivation as workers and their value as members of society
became suspect. Of all the myths of the Welfare State, stories of the work shy
and borrowers have been the least well founded on evidence, yet they have proved
the most persistent. The unemployed were accused of being responsible for their
own workless condition, and doubts were expressed about the State's obligation
either to provide them with the security of work or to support them through
Social Security. Underlying the arguments about unemployment and
the unemployed is a basic disagreement about the nature and meaning of work in
society. To what extent can or should work be regarded as a service, not only
performed by the worker for society but also made secure for the worker by the
State, and supported if necessary? And apart from cash are there social
pressures and satisfactions which cause individuals to seek and keep work, so
that the workless need work rather than just
cash?
单选题The patient was making good progress but suffered a ______ when he caught a cold.
单选题One of the most interesting inhabitants of our world is the bee, an insect which is indigenous to all parts of the globe except the Polar Regions.
单选题The first few months of the year I had dreaded the ringing of the telephone, because I knew it meant another______decision to be made.(上海交通大学2008年试题)
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单选题Women once demanded men with social skills, but they're now focusing on "his values, if he's interested in family". A. impeditive B. colossal C. blemish D. impeccable
单选题It can be inferred that the attitude of scientists towards pollution has been ______.
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