单选题He has behaved in the most extraordinary way recently; I can"t ______ his behaving like that at all.

单选题Compared with his ______, Putin adopted a more active, flexible and pragmatic foreign policy. A. ancestor B. predecessor C. forerunner D. pioneer

单选题Medievalists usually distinguish medieval public law from private law: the former was concerned with government and military affairs and the latter with the family, social status, and land transactions. Examination on medieval women"s lives shows this distinction to be overly simplistic. Although medieval women were legally excluded from roles that categorized as public, such as solider, justice, jury member, or professional administrative official, women"s control of land—usually considered a private or domestic phenomenon—had important political implications in the feudal system of thirteenth- century England. Since land equaled wealth and wealth equaled power, certain women exercised influence by controlling land. Unlike unmarried women who were legally subject to their guardians or married women who had no legal identity separate from their husbands, women who were widows had autonomy with respect to acquiring or disposing of certain property, suing in court, incurring liability for their own debts, and making wills. Although feudal lands were normally transferred through primogeniture (the eldest son inheriting all), when no sons survived, the surviving daughters inherited equal shares under what was known as partible inheritance. In addition to controlling any such land inherited from her parents and any bridal dowry—property a woman brought to the marriage from her own family—a widow was entitled to use of one-third of her late husband"s lands. Called "dower" in England, this grant had greater legal importance under common law than did the bridal dowry; no marriage was legal unless the groom endowed the bride with this property at the wedding ceremony. In 1215 Magna Carta (The charter of English political and civil liberties granted by King John at Runnymede in June 1215) guaranteed a widow"s fight to claim her dower without paying a fine; this document also strengthened widow"s ability to control land by prohibiting forced remarriage. After 1272 women could also benefit from jointure: the groom could agree to hold part or all of his lands jointly with the bride, so that if one spouse died, the other received these lands. Since many widows had inheritances as well as dowers, widows were frequently the financial heads of the family; even though legal theory assumed the maintenance of the principle of primogeniture, the amount of land the widow controlled could exceed that of her son or of other male heirs. Anyone who held feudal land exercised authority over the people attached to the land—knights, rental tenants, and peasants—and had to hire estate administrators, oversee accounts, receive rents, protect tenants from outside encroachment, punish tenants for not paying rents, appoint priests to local parishes, and act as guardians of tenants" children and executors of their wills. Many married women fulfilled these duties as deputies for husbands away at court or at war, but widows could act on their own behalf. Widow"s legal independence is suggested by their frequent appearance in thirteenth-century English legal records. Moreover, the scope of their sway (3. a: a controlling influence b: sovereign power: DOMINION c: the ability to exercise influence or authority: DOMINANCE; synonyms see POWER.) is indicated by the fact that some controlled not merely single estates, but multiple counties.

单选题Not until the advent of histochemistry could the anatomist see through the microscope ceils which carry specific enzymes or Ugauge/U how active these enzymes are in different ceils under various conditions.

单选题Naturalists say that (there is evidence) to support the assertion (which) anthropoids, (whether in) (captivity) or in the native state, sometimes beat their breasts.A. there is evidenceB. whichC. whether inD. captivity

单选题As you read this, nearly 80, 000 Americans are waiting for a new heart, kidney or some other organ that could save their life. Tragically, about 6, 000 of them will die this year — nearly twice as many people as perished in the Sept. 11 attacks — because they won't get their transplant in time. The vast majority of Americans(86% , according to one poll)say they support organ donation. But only 20% actually sign up to do it. Why the shortfall? Part of the problem is the way we handle organ donations. Americans who want to make this sort of gift have to opt in — that is, indicate on a driver's license that when they die, they want their organs to be made available. Many European and Asian countries take the opposite approach; in Singapore, for example, all residents receive a letter when they come of age informing them that their organs may be harvested unless they explicitly object. In Belgium, which adopted a similar presumed-consent system 12 years ago, less than 2% of the population has decided to opt out. Further complicating the situation in the U. S. is the fact that whatever decision you make can be overruled by your family. The final say is left to your surviving relatives, who must make up their minds in the critical hours after brain death has been declared. There are as many as 50 body parts, from your skin to your corneas, that can save or transform the life of a potential recipient, but for many families lost in grief, the idea of dismembering a loved one is more than they can bear. The U. S. , like all medically advanced societies, has struggled to find a way to balance an individual's rightful sovereignty over his or her body with society's need to save its members from avoidable deaths. Given America's tradition of rugged individualism and native distrust of Big Brotherly interference, it's not surprising that voters resisted attempts to switch to a presumed-consent system when it was proposed in California, Oregon, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Health Secretary Tommy Thompson last spring announced plans for a new initiative to encourage donations — including clearer consent forms — but its impact is expected to be modest. Given the crying need for organs, perhaps it's time we considered shifting to something closer to the presumed-consent model. Meanwhile, if you want to ensure that your organs are donated when you die, you should say so in a living will or fill out a Uniform Donor Card(available from the American Medical Association). Make sure your closest relatives know about it. And if you don't want to donate an organ, you should make your wishes equally explicit.

单选题Do you have an afternoon ______ this week to meet the president? A. obtainable B. available C. visible D. reliable

单选题To get from Kathmandu to the tiny village in Nepal, Dave Irvine-Halliday spent more than two days. When he arrived, he found villagers working and reading around battery-powered lamps equipped with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs--the same lamps he had left there in 2000. Irvine-Halliday, an American photonics engineer, was not surprised. He chose to use LED bulbs because they are rugged, portable, long-lived, and, extremely efficient. Each of his lamps produces a useful amount of illumination from just one watt of power. Villagers use them about four hours each night, then top off the battery by pedaling a generator for half an hour. The cool, steady beam is a huge improvement over lamps still common in developing countries. In fact, LEDs have big advantages over familiar incandescent (白炽的) lights as well--so much so that Irvine-Halliday expects LEDs will eventually take over from Thomas Edison's old lightbulb as the world's main source of artificial illumination. The dawn of LEDs began about 40 years ago, but early LEDs produced red or green glows suitable mainly for displays in digital clocks and calculators. A decade ago, engineers invented a semiconductor crystal made of an aluminum compound that produced a much brighter red light. Around the same time, a Japanese engineer developed the first practical blue LED. This small advance had a huge impact because blue, green, and red LEDs can be combined to create most of the colors of the rainbow, just as that in a color television picture. These days, high-intensity color LEDs are showing up everywhere such as the traffic lights. The reasons for the rapid switchover are simple. Incandescent bulbs have to be replaced annually, but LED traffic lights should last five to yen years. LEDs also use 80 to 90 percent less electricity than the conventional signals they replace. Collectively, the new traffic lights save at least 400 million kilowatt-hours a year in the United States. Much bigger savings await if LEDs can supplant Mr. Edison's bulb at the office and in the living room. Creating a white-light LED that is energy-saving, cheap and appealing has proved a tough engineering challenge. But all the major lightbulb makers--including General Electric, Philips, and Osram-Sylvania--are teaming up with semiconductor manufacturers to make it happen.

单选题What is it that keeps the developing world in an apparent state of perpetual poverty? Poor education, lack of basic medical care, and the absence of democratic structures all certainly contribute to these nations' plight. However, according to Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, the overriding cause is the overwhelming prevalence of black market activity, well outside the formal economy, in these countries. The losses incurred from this condition are twofold. First, they deny the government tax revenues which could be used to improve education, medical treatment, and government efficiency. More important, however, they deny earners the chance to accumulate assets recognized by law and thus prevent them from leveraging those assets to borrow. Reforming these nations' legal systems in order to confer ownership through tilting, de Soto argues, would help the poor there access the assets their work should be generating. These assets could then be used to buy homes and construct businesses, thus building a more stable and prosperous economy. De Soto estimates the value of these assets, which he terms "dead capital, " at nearly $10 trillion world wide. De Soto is not the first to locate the developing world's problems in the domain of property rights. Others have tried property rights reform and failed. According to de Soto, this is because his predecessors attempted to model their plans on existing, successful property rights systems. In other words, they tried to transplant American and British property law to an inhospitable host. De Soto argues that, within many of the extralegal markets of the developing world, mutually agreed upon rules for distributing assets and recognizing property rights already exist. Rather than force these markets to adjust to a new, foreign system of property tilting, reformers should focus on codifying the existing systems wherever it is practical to do so. This would facilitate a quicker, more natural transition to an economy that builds wealth rather than squanders it.

单选题I will briefly discuss the benefits_____I feel have resulted from the project.

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单选题 Passage 4 Finding something new to say about America's love affair with the death penalty is not easy. The subject not only arouses intense emotions, it has produced an ocean of comment from lawyers, judges, politicians, campaigners, statisticians, social scientists and quite a few demagogues. Nevertheless, Franklin Zimring, one of America's leading criminologists, has managed to rise above this cacophony to write a thought-provoking and genuinely original book, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment', which deserves to become a classic. Mr. Zimring tackles head-on the most puzzling question of all- why are Americans so determined to keep the death penalty when nearly all other developed democracies have given it up, and now view it as barbaric? In the past two decades, attitudes in America and Europe have diverged so much that any dialogue on the subject has been replaced by blank incomprehension, and America's retention of capital punishment has become a significant diplomatic irritant. For European governments the abolition of capital punishment is a human-rights priority, and they have expended valuable political capital in trying to achieve it. American governments, Republican and Democratic, insist that the death penalty has nothing to do with human-rights, and deeply resent European efforts to make its abolition an international norm. The difference between European and American attitudes, says Mr. Zimring, is not the breadth of support for the death penalty, but its depth. At the time of the death penalty's abolition in each developed country, a majority similar to America's, currently 65%, wanted to keep it, according to opinion polls. But when European political elites turned against it after the Second World War, electorates acquiesced. Today most Europeans probably would not want it back. The death penalty is a far more contentious issue in America, says Mr. Zimring, because the debate about it draws on a cherished American political tradition which does not exist anywhere else: vigilante justice. Many death-penalty supporters see executions not as acts of a distant or unreliable government, or even as a crime-control measure, but as an instrument of local, community justice, a form of vengeance on behalf of the victims' relatives. In a startling analysis, Mr. Zimring shows that most executions are performed in a few states in the south and south-west where the lynching of African-Americans, other forms of mob violence and six-shooter justice were most endemic at the end of the 19th and first half of the 20 centuries. Opinion-poll support for the death penalty may be fairly uniform across America, and 38 states have the death penalty on their books, but many states hardly ever execute anyone. The vast bulk of executions take place only where the values of the lynch mob have endured, he says. Many people will find this linkage distasteful. But Mr. Zimring marshals a powerful case for it, and sceptics will have to reply to his evidence, not just brush the argument aside. Americans' distrust of overweening government power is as deeply rooted a tradition as vigilante justice, Mr. Zimring concedes. However, when it comes to the death penalty, this distrust is manifest not in an abolitionist movement, as in other countries, but in the maze of legal-appeals procedures which mean that most murderers condemned to death spend years, even decades, on death row. More death-row inmates are likely to die of old age than by execution. Neither supporters nor opponents of the death penalty are happy with this odd result. What Americans really want is an error-free death penalty, but this can never be guaranteed, as the recent spate of death-row exonerations has shown. Moreover, Mr. Zimring argues that Americans' ambivalence about capital punishment can never be resolved. Sooner or later, one of these competing traditions - a regard for careful legal processes to second-guess and constrain government actions, or the desire for vengeance - will have to give way. That will not happen easily. Both date back to the country's founding. Mr. Zimring believes, on scanty evidence, that Americans will eventually abandon vigilante values, and abolish the death penalty. But he admits that this will be a messy, bitter affair. And he could well be wrong. His analysis might equally point to another, less palatable outcome: a sweeping aside of legal constraints, and a more rapid pace of executions.Comprehension Questions:

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Opinion polls are now beginning to show an unwilling general agreement that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely. But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm? 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 neighbourhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centres 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 about may have to be reversed. This seems a discouraging thought. But, in fact, it could offer 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 transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people travelled longer distances to their places of employment until eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and places in which they lived. Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. It became customary for the husband to go out to paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and resources away from the impractical goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full-time jobs.

单选题4 When I was still an architecture student, a teacher told me, "We learn more from buildings that fall down than from buildings that stand up. " What he meant was that con struction is as much the result of experience as of theory. Although structural design fol lows established formulas, the actual performance of a building is complicated by the pas sage of time, the behavior of users, the natural elements--and unnatural events. All are difficult to simulate. Buildings, unlike cars, can't be crash-tested. The first important lesson of the World Trade Center collapse is that tall buildings can withstand the impact of a large jetliner. The twin towers were supported by 59 perimeter columns on each side. Although about 30 of these columns, extending from four to six floors, were destroyed in each building by the impact, initially both towers remained standing. Even so, the death toll (代价) was appalling—2,245 people lost their lives. I was once asked, how tall buildings should be designed given what we'd learned from the World Trade Center collapse. My answer was,"Lower. " The question of when a tail building becomes unsafe is easy to answer. Common aerial fire-fighting ladders in use today are 100 feet high and can reach to about the 10th floor, so fires in buildings up to 10 sto ries high can be fought from the exterior (外部). Fighting fires and evacuating occupants above that height depend on fire stairs. The taller the building, the longer it will take for firefighters to climb to the scene of the fire. So the simple answer to the safety question is "Lower than 10 stories. " Then why don't cities impose lower height limits? A 60-story office building does not have six times as much rentable space as a 10-story building. However, all things being equal, such a building wili produce four times more revenue and four times more in proper ty taxes. So cutting building heights would mean cutting city budgets. The most important lesson of the World Trade Center collapse is not that we should stop building tall buildings but that we have misjudged their cost. We did the same thing when we underestimated the cost of hurtling along a highway in a steel box at 70 miles per hour. It took many years before seat belts, air bags, radial tires, and antilock brakes be came commonplace. At first, cars simply were too slow to warrant concern. Later, manu facturers resisted these expensive devices, arguing that consumers would not pay for safe ty. Now we do—willingly.

单选题I asked him where my sister was, and he______the store across the street.

单选题Spectral reading of the light reflected by an Earth-like planet ______.

单选题I will ______ you personally responsible if anything goes wrong in this project. A. get B. hold C. let D. have

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