单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} Computer monitoring is most often intended to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace, but with good intentions comes the opportunity for abuse by employers and employees alike. Computer Monitoring in the 21st Century written by a futurist is an exceptional observation as to what the future may hold for those people choosing to enter the technological field such as industry, commerce, medicine and science. As computer monitoring increases, there comes a concern for the types of effects it may have in the workplace. The article says: "By the end of the decade, as many as 30 million people may constantly be monitored in their jobs." As computer systems become so sophisticated, this number will drastically increase. As we enter this new age of technology, we must remember that with more power comes more responsibility by employers and employees alike. Knowledge can be used as a weapon or as a tool. For instance, monitoring abuse can be found in the situation of airline agents. The agents discovered that by keeping customers on hold while finishing their work they could gain an extra 5-minute break. In the future, employees who are accustomed to evading the monitoring system may no longer be able to tolerate it. These types of employees may find they can no longer survive the added pressure of not being able to evade the system. While monitoring can add pressure to some employees, it can also be a relief to others. It is a relief to the employee, because it provides information readily at hand. With the use of prompts, acting as reminders to workers, the information needed is passed on efficiently allowing employees to do a better job. However, if prompts are used to tell an employee how much time has been wasted or how bad an employee is doing his job, it could cause the opposite effect. Monitoring can have a positive effect on workers by letting the employees access their own information. In a study, early information about job performance given by a computer is accepted better than a performance rating given by a boss. At this time, monitoring is based on the output of an employee's performance. In the future, there will be more freedom for employees to use their own ideas, therefore making monitoring more effective. One example of monitoring as a weapon is seen when a woman who took an extra minute in the bathroom was threatened with loosing her job. With this added stress she suffered a nervous breakdown. The company insisted that they were not "spying" but were only trying to improve their business. If monitoring is not used correctly, businesses will suffer with increases in operating costs because of increased turnover, absenteeism, medical costs and worker's compensation. Employers who use positive reinforcement with monitoring will guarantee better motivation. Legislation has the potential to help employees with issues of better treatment and the fight to privacy. In the new century, companies that succeeded will be the ones who learn from the past and from the "me boss and you employee" mentality. A good blacksmith can take a hammer and forge a weapon into a tool that can benefit the whole village. Employers are the blacksmiths; employees are the hammers. Monitoring is the tool. It takes both to make a tool to benefit the future.

单选题Human facial expressions differ from those of animals in the degree to which they can be______controlled and modified. A. deliberately B. delicately C. definitely D. defectively

单选题Read the following passages, decide on the best one of the choices marked A, B, C and D for each question or unfinished statement and then mark the corresponding letter with a single bar across the square bracket. Sustainable development is applied to just about everything from energy to clean water and economic growth, and as a result it has become difficult to question either the basic assumptions behind it or the way the concept is put to use. This is especially true in agriculture, where sustainable development is often taken as the sole measure of progress without a proper appreciation of historical and cultural perspectives. To start with, it is important to remember that the nature of agriculture has changed markedly throughout history, and will continue to do so. Medieval agriculture in northern Europe fed, clothed and sheltered a predominantly rural society with a much lower population density than it is today. It had minimal effect on biodiversity, and any pollution it caused was typically localised. In terms of energy use and the nutrients(营养成分) captured in the product it was relatively inefficient. Contrast this with farming since the start of the industrial revolution. Competition from overseas led farmers to specialise and increase yields. Throughout this period food became cheaper, safer and more reliable. However, these changes have also led to habitat(栖息地) loss and to diminishing biodiversity. What's more demand for animal products in developing countries is growing so fast that meeting it will require an extra 300 million tons of grain a year by 2050. Yet the growth of cities and industry is reducing the amount of water available for agriculture in many regions. All this means that agriculture in the 21st century will have to be very different from how it was in the 20th. This will require radical thinking. For example, we need to move away from the idea that traditional practices are inevitably more sustainable than new ones. We also need to abandon the notion that agriculture can be "zero impact". The key will be to abandon the rather simple and static measures of sustainability, which centre on the need to maintain production without increasing damage. Instead we need a more dynamic interpretation, one that looks at the pros and cons (正反两方面)of all the various ways land is used. There are many different ways to measure agricultural performance besides food yield: energy use, environmental (costs, water purity, carbon footprint and biodiversity. It is clear, for example, that the carbon cost of transposing tomatoes from Spain to the UK is less than that of producing them in the UK with additional heating and lighting. But we do not know whether lower carbon footprints will always be better for biodiversity. What is crucial is recognising that sustainable agriculture is not just about sustainable food production.

单选题Here's the scary thing about the identity-theft ring that the feds cracked last week: there was nothing any of its estimated 40, 000 victims could have done to prevent it from happening. This was an inside job, according to court documents. A lowly help-desk worker at Teledata Communications, a software firm that helps banks access credit reports online, allegedly stole passwords for those reports and sold them to a group of 20 thieves at $ 60 a pop. That allowed the gang to cherry-pick consumers with good credit and apply for all kinds of accounts in their names. Cost to the victims: $3 million and rising. Even scarier is that this, the largest identity-theft bust to date, is just a drop in the bit bucket. More than 700, 000 Americans have their credit hijacked every year. It's one of crime's biggest growth markets. A name, address and Social Security number — which can often be found on the Web — is all anybody needs to apply for a bogus line of credit. Credit companies make $1.3 trillion annually and lose less than 2% of that revenue to fraud, so there's little financial incentive for them to make the application process more secure. As it stands now, it's up to you to protect your identity. The good news is that there are plenty of steps you can take. Most credit thieves are opportunists, not well-organized gangs. A lot of them go Dumpster diving for those millions of "pre-approved" credit-card mailings that go out every day. Others steal wallets and return them, taking only a Social Security number. Shredding your junk mail and leaving your Social Security card at home can save a lot of agony later. But the most effective way to keep your identity clean is to check your credit reports once or twice a year. There are three major credit-report outfits: Equifax(at equifax. com), Trans-Union(www. transunion. com)and Experian(experian. com). All allow you to order reports online, which is a lot better than wading through voice-mail hell on their 800 lines. Of the three, I found TransUnion's website to be the cheapest and most comprehensive — laying out state-by-state prices, rights and tips for consumers in easy-to-read fashion. If you're lucky enough to live in Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey or Vermont, you are entitled to one free report a year by law. Otherwise it's going to cost $ 8 to $ 14 each time. Avoid services that offer to monitor your reports year-round for about $70; that's $10 more than the going rate among thieves. If you think you're a victim of identity theft, you can ask for fraud alerts to be put on file at each of the three credit-report companies. You can also download a theft-report form at www. consumer. gov/idtheft, which, along with a local police report, should help when irate creditors come knocking. Just don't expect justice. That audacious help-desk worker was one of the fewer than 2% of identity thieves who are ever caught.

单选题A Always since the creation of celluloid, B plastics have been found C to have D a multitude of industrial and commercial uses.

单选题He was in extreme state of distress and depression when he knew that he had ______ lung cancer. A.extracted B.contracted C.abstracted D.attracted

单选题The______of coal in that factory is five tons a day.

单选题Nobody knows why there are so few women at the ______ of movies. A. helm B. seat C. control D. reign

单选题The poor old man was _____with diabetes and without proper treatment he would lose his eyesight and become crippled very soon.

单选题Laurels are valued for their aromatic oils and spices, edible fruits, and Utimber/U.

单选题You can come with me to the museum this afternoon ______ you don't mind walking for half an hour.

单选题Shall we request that the manager ______ our suggestion again?

单选题In New Orleans, meanwhile, the dredging of channels has ______ huge amounts of marshland. A. compromised B. proliferated C. produced D. modified

单选题Communication skills seem to count for little in comparison with reputation ______ invitations to speak.

单选题Opinion polls are now beginning to show that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now no, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to make ways of sharing the available employment more widely. But we need to go further. We must ask some primary questions about the future of work. Would we continue to treat employment as the norm? Would we not rather encourage many other ways for self-respecting people to work? Should we not create conditions in which many of us can work for ourselves, rather than for an employer? Should we not aim to revive the household and the neighborhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centers of production and work? The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people's work has taken the form of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of the changes in work patterns which it brought may have to be reversed. This seems a daunting thought. But, in fact, it could provide the prospect of a better future for work. Universal employment, as its history shows, has not meant economic freedom. Employment became widespread when the enclosures of the 17th and 18th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by depriving them of the use of the land, and thus of the means to provide a living for themselves. Then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people's homes. Later, as transportation improved, first by rail and then by road, people commuted longer distances to their places of employment until, eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and the place in which they lived. Meanwhile employment put women at a disadvantage. In pre-industrial time, men and women had shared the productive work of the household and village community. Now it became customary for the husband to go out to paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. Tax and benefit regulations still assume this norm today and restrict more flexible sharing of work roles between the sexes. It was not only women whose work status suffered, as employment became the dominant form of work, young people and old people were excluded — a problem now, as more teenagers become frustrated at school and more retired people want to live active lives. All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and resources away from the idealist goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full time jobs.

单选题In mathematics the term "solid" describes a geometric figure with three dimensions. A. angle B. shape C. triangle D. equation

单选题For years, doctors have given cancer patients three main treatments: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Now researchers are developing a fourth weapon: the patient's own immune system. New vaccines and drugs can stimulate the production of an army of cells and antibodies that kill cancer cells. Drug-vaccine therapy may lie lifesaver for Deerfield man. Few people survive advanced melanoma, but immune therapy is giving Deerfield resident Douglas Parker a fighting chance. The 46-year-old salesman noticed a mole on his chest three and a half years ago that was found to be cancerous. Doctors removed the mole but didn't get all of the cancer. The cancer spread to other parts of his body, including his liver, where a tumor grew as large as a baseball. Parker took interferon and interleukin-2 to boost his immune system's ability to fight the cancer. The tumor shrank but didn't disappear. In August, 1997, surgeons removed it, along with two thirds of his liver. Last January, doctors discovered a new tumor on Parker's left adrenal gland. He received an experimental cancer vaccine at the University of Chicago Hospitals, but the vaccine didn't stop the cancer from spreading to his right adrenal gland. To augment the vaccine, doctors at Lutheran General Hospital gave Parker a new round of intcrleukin-2 and interferon. The drug-vaccine combination has shrunk the tumors. And while it's too early to pronounce Parker cured, immune therapy may save his life. "I want to do this to help myself as well as other people who have melanoma," he said. Immune therapy "ultimately will be a significant change in the way we treat a lot of different cancers," said Dr. Jon Richards of Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, who is testing cancer vaccines on melanoma patients. "It will be an equal partner with the other three treatments in the next five to ten years." Several drugs that bolster the immune system have been approved, and vaccines are being tested in dozens of clinical trials, including several in the Chicago area. Many of the experimental vaccines have been tested on patients with advanced melanoma who have little chance of surviving with conventional treatments alone. Researchers also have begun doing work that could lead to vaccines to treat prostate, lung, colon and other cancers. Immune therapy alone won't cure cancer. But when used after conventional treatments, it could kill cancer cells that survive surgery, radiation or chemotherapy, researchers said. Some day, vaccines also might be able to prevent certain cancers. It may be possible to vaccinate against viruses and bacteria that help cause cervical, liver and stomach cancers, the National Cancer Institute said.

单选题Rather, our particular modern tragedy ______ the great asymmetry, and the consequential but unintended power of science to enhance its effect.

单选题The reason for the ubiquitous production of light by the microorganisms of the sea remains obscure, and suggested explanations are controversial. It has been suggested that light is a kind of inadvertent by-product of life in transparent organisms.

单选题Someone who gives an expensive gift often feels that he should receive more praise than if he ______ a less expensive gift. A. gave B. gives C. had given D. has given