单选题After his recovery from illness, he is determined to ______ what he
had been doing to attain the goal.
A. assume
B. consume
C. presume
D. resume
单选题Before the construction of the road, it was prohibitively expensive to transport any furs or fruits across the mountains.
单选题The questions raised by the author are becoming “un?avoidable” for many modern Western democracies NOT because ( )
单选题Because of______reviews, the producer announced that the play will close with tonight's performance.
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Passage Four At the fall 2001 Social
Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network
sponsored a forum on the history of gun ownership, gun use, and gun violence in
the United States. Our purpose was to consider how social science historians
might contribute to the public debate over gun control and gun rights. To date,
we have had little impact on that debate. It has been dominated by
mainstream social scientists and historians, especially scholars such as Gary
Kleck, John Lott, and Michael Bellesiles, whose work, despite profound flaws, is
politically congenial to either opponents or proponents of gun control. Kleck
and Mark Gertz, for instance, argue on the basis of their widely cited survey
that gun owners prevent numerous crimes each year in the United States by using
firearms to defend themselves and their property. If their survey respondents
are to be believed, American gun owners shot 100, 000 criminals in 1994 in
self-defense--a preposterous number. Lott claims on the basis of his statistical
analysis of recent crime rates that laws allowing private individuals to carry
concealed firearms deter murders, rapes, and robberies, because criminals
are afraid to attack potentially armed victims. However, he biases his results
by confining his analysis to the year between 1977 and 1992, when violent crime
rates had peaked and varied little from year to year. He reports only regression
models that support his thesis and neglects to mention that each of those models
find a positive relationship between violent crime and real income, and an
inverse relationship between violent crime and unemployment.
Contrary to Kleck and Lott, Bellesiles insists that guns and America's
"gun culture" are responsible for America's high rates of murder. In
Bellesiles's opinion, relatively few Americans owned guns before the 1850s or
know how to use, maintain, or repair them. As a result, he says, guns
contributed little to the homicide rate, especially among white, which was low
everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assume
guns and murder went hand in hand. According to Bellesiles, these patterns
changed dramatically after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War,
when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of
handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The
result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides that never truly
abated. To this day, the United States has the highest homicide rate of any
industrial democracy. Bellesiles's low estimates of gun ownership in early
America conflict, however, with those of every historian who has previously
studied the subject and have thus far proven irreproducible.
Every homicide statistic he presents is either misleading or
wrong. Given the influence of KJeck, Lott, Beliesiles, and other
partisan scholars on the debate over gun control and gun rights, we felt a need
to pull together what social science historians have learned to date about the
history of gun ownership and gun violence in America, and to consider what
research methods and projects might increase our knowledge in the near
future.
单选题Compared mathematically to smoking and driving, almost everything else seems relatively risk-free, ______ almost nothing seems worth regulation. A. yet B. since C. so D. even though
单选题
单选题The vast majority of people in any given culture will ______ to the
established standards of that culture.
A. confine
B. conform
C. confront
D. confirm
单选题The gloves were really loo small, and it was only by______them that I managed to get them on.
单选题The age of the general practitioner is over. More and more graduates of medical schools tend to ______,that is, to concentrate on limited areas of their profession.
单选题He does not ______ as a teacher of English as his pronunciation is
terrible.
A. equal
B. match
C. qualify
D. fit
单选题There was something feverish, even ______, in the manner in which shoppers crowded into shops in the last days before Christmas. A. desperate B. courageous C. discriminating D. courteous
单选题All normal human beings are ______ at least to a degree -they get a feeling of warmth and kinship from engaging in group activities.
单选题The local people were joyfully surprised to find the price of
vegetables no longer ______ according to the weather.
A. altered
B. convened
C. fluctuated
D. modified
单选题Doctors in this hospital have successfully ______ 100 surgical treatments to remedy those suffering nearsightedness.
单选题
单选题
Biologically, there is only one quality
which distinguishes us from animals: the ability to laugh. In a universe which
appears to be utterly devoid of humor, we enjoy this supreme luxury. And it is a
luxury, for unlike any other bodily process, laughter does not seem serve a
biologically useful purpose. In a divided world, a laughter is a unifying force.
Human begins oppose each other on a great many issues. Nations may disagree
about systems of government and human relations may be plagued by ideological
factions and political camps, but we all share the ability to laugh. And
laughter, in turn, depends on the most complex and subtle of all-human
qualities: a sense of humor. Certain comic stereotypes have a universal appeal.
This can best be seen from the world-wide popularity of Charlie Chaplain's early
films. The little man at odds with society never fails to amuse no matter which
country we come from. As that great commentator on human affairs, Dr. Samuel
Johnson, once remarked, "Men have been wise in very different modes; but they
have always laughed in the same way." A sense of humor may take
various forms and laughter may he anything from refined tinkle to an
earthquaking roar, but the effect is always the same. Humor helps us to maintain
a correct sense of values. It is the one quality which political fanatics appear
to lack. If we can see the funny side, we never make the mistake of taking
ourselves too seriously. We are always reminded that tragedy is not really far
removed from comedy, so we never get a lop-sided view of things.
This is one of the chief functions of satire and irony. Human pain and
suffering are so grim; we hover so often on the brink of war, political
realities are usually enough to plunge us into total despair. In such
circumstances, cartoons and satirical accounts of somber political events
redress the balance. They take the wind out of pompous and arrogant politicians
who have lost their sense of proportion. They enable us to see that many of our
most profound actions are merely comic or absurd. We laugh when a great satirist
like Swift writes about wars in Gulliver's Travels. The Lilliputians and their
neighbors attack each other because they can't agree which end to break an egg.
We laugh because we are meant to laugh; but we are meant to weep too. It is no
wonder that in totalitarian regimes any satire against the Establishment is
wholly banned. It is too powerful weapon to be allowed to flourish.
The sense of humor must be singled out as man's most important quality
because it is associated with laughter. And laughter, in turn, is associated
with happiness. Courage, determination, initiative--these are qualities we share
with other forms of life. But the sense of humor is uniquely human. If happiness
is one of the great goals of life, then it is the sense of humor that provides
the key.
单选题It is developing a service that will let you create all online identity that can ______ various claims that it will back up.
单选题The actress was very______at the insulting question raised by her opponent at the conference. A. extraterrestrial B. explicit C. indignant D. innovative
单选题There is a range of activities which require movements of about one to four or five miles. These might be leisure activities, such as moving from home to swimming pool, tennis club, the theater or other cultural centers, or to a secondary or more advanced school, or they might be movements associated with work and shopping in the central areas of cities. The use of cars capable of carrying five people at 80 mph for satisfying these needs is wasteful of space and most productive of disturbance to other road users.
The use of the bicycle, or some more modem derivative of it, is probably worth more consideration than has recently been given to it. The bicycle itself is a remarkably efficient and simple device for using human muscular energy for transportation. In pure energy terms, it is four to five times as efficient as walking, even though human walking itself is twice as efficient as the movement of effective animals such as dogs or gulls. It is still widely used, not only in some developing countries where bicycles are major means of people and goods, but in a few richer towns such as Amsterdam in Holland and Cambridge in England.
It usually gives inadequate protection from the weather, is not very suitable for carrying goods, and demands considerable muscular work to make progress against wind or uphill. It also offers its rider no protection against collisions with other vehicles. All these difficulties could, however, be greatly eliminated, if not removed, with relatively small changes in design. The whole machine could be enclosed in a plastic bubble which would provide some protection in case of accidents. It would be easy to add a small petrol or electric motor. A wide variety of designs would be possible. As in rowing, we might employ the power of the arms or the general body musculature, as well as those of the legs; more muscular exercise would be good for the health of many people in cities, and a wide use of bicycle like muscle-powered vehicles would be a useful way to ensure this. It could also provide ample opportunities for showing off by the young and vigorous.
