单选题The workers went on strike for ______ working conditions.

单选题His daughter was so ______ that she cried for hours when her pet cat died.

单选题Part of his general thrift is to be Umeticulous/U in verifying monthly expenses.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} Our present generation of cultural critics, arriving after the assault of postmodernism and the increasingly widespread commercialization of culture, has been cast adrift, without any firm basis for judgments. Publications and institutions to support serious criticism, in this view, either no longer exist or are few in number. Critics today, it is also claimed, are too cozy behind the ivied walls of academe, content to employ a prose style that is decipherable only to a handful of the cognoscenti. The deadly dive of Uniersity critics into the shallow depths of popular culture, moreover, reveals the unwillingness of these critics to uphold standards. Even if the reasons offered are contradictory, these Jeremiahs huddle around their sad conclusion that serious cultural criticism has fallen into a morass of petty bickering and bloated reputations. Such narratives of declension, a staple of American intellectual life since the time of the Puritans, are misplaced, self-serving, and historically inaccurate, so difficult to prove. Has the level of criticism declined in the last 50 years? Of coarse the logic of such an opinion depends on the figures that are being contrasted with one another. Any number of cultural critics thriving today could be invoked to demonstrate that cultural criticism is alive and well. But many new and thriving venues for criticism and debate exist today, and they are not limited solely t6 the discussion of literary works. Actually, they became so entrusted with their own certitude and political judgments that they beacme largely irrelevant. Today the complaint is that literary culture lacks civility. We live in an age of commercialism and spectacle. Writers seek the limelight, and one way to bask in it is to publish reviews that scorch the landscape, with Dale Peck as the famous, but not a typical case in point. Heidi Julavits, in an essay in The Believer, lamented the downfall of serious fiction and reviewing. She surveyed a literary culture that had embraced "snark", her term for hostile, self-serving reviews. The snark review, according to Julavits, eschews a serious engagement with literature in favor of a sound-bite approach, an attempt to turn the review into a form of entertainment akin to film reviews or restaurant critiques. A critic found cultural criticism to be in "critical condition". For him, the postmodern turn to theory, in its questioning of objectivity, cut the critical, independent ground out from under reviewers. The rise of chain bookstores and blockbuster best sellers demeaned literary culture, making it prey to the commercial values of the market and entertainment. The criticism does not seem discontinuous. Nor should we forget that civility rarely reigned in the circles of New York intellectuals. The art critic Clement Greenberg physically pummeled the theatre critic Lionel Abel after Abel rejected the view that Jean Wahl, the French philosopher, was anti-Semitic. Though Robert Peck has the reputation of a literary hatchet man, so far as I know his blows thus far have all been confined to the printed page. Cultural criticism has certainly changed over the years. The old day's of the critic who wielded unchallenged authority have happily passed. Ours is a more pluralistic age, one not beholden to a narrow literary culture. The democratization of criticism— as in the Amazon system of readers' evaluating books—is a messy affair, as democracy must be. But the solution to the problems of criticism in the present is best not discovered in the musty basements of nostalgia and sentiment for the cultual criticism of a half-century gone. Rather the solution is to recognize, as John Dewey did almost a century ago, that the problems of democracy demand more democracy, less nostalgia for a golden age that never was, and a spirit of openness to what is new and invigorating in our culture.

单选题Our journey was slow because the train stopped______at different villages. A. gradually B. continuously C. constantly D. continually

单选题Neither Jane nor her brothers ______a consent form for tomorrow's field trip.

单选题My hrother is a______ motorist. He never does any dangerous driving.

单选题The changing image of the family on television provides ______ into changing attitudes toward the family in society.(2011年四川大学考博试题)

单选题A few minutes ago, walking back from lunch, I started to cross the street when I heard the sound of a coin dropping. It wasn"t much but, as I turned, my eyes caught the heads of several other people turning, too. A woman dropped what appeared to be a dime. The tinkling sound of a coin dropping on pavement is an attention-getter. It can be nothing more than a penny. Whatever the coin is, no one ignores the sound of it. It got me thinking about sounds again. We are besieged by so many sounds that attract the most attention. People in New York City seldom turn to look when a fire engine, a police car or an ambulance comes screaming along the street. When I"m in New York, I"m a New Yorker. I don"t turn either. Like the natives, I hardly hear a siren there. At home in my little town in Connecticut, it"s different. The distant ringing of a police car brings me to my feet if I"m in bed. It"s the quietest sounds that have the most effect on us, not the loudest. In the middle of the night, I can hear a dripping tap a hundred yards away though three closed doors. I"ve been hearing little creaking noises and sounds which my imagination turns into footsteps in the middle of the night for twenty-five years in our house. How come I never hear the sounds in the daytime? I"m quite clear in my mind what the good sounds are and what the bad sounds are. I"ve turned against whistling, for instance. I used to think of it as the mark of a happy worker but lately I"ve been associating the whistler with a nervous person making compulsive noises. The tapping, tapping, tapping of my typewriter as the keys hit the paper is a lovely sound to me. I often like the sound of what I write better than the looks of it.

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单选题The constitutional guarantee of free speech may have been aimed at protecting native speakers of English from censorship, but it is not a great ______ to interpret it as protecting the right to express oneself in any natural language or dialect.

单选题______ some questions about the bookkeeper"s honesty, the company asked him to leave.

单选题One reaction to all the concern about tropical deforestation is a blank stare that asks the question, "Since I don"t live in the tropics, what does it have to do with me?" The answer is that your way of life, wherever you live in the world, is tied to the tropics in many ways. If you live in a house, wash your hair, eat fruit and vegetables, drink soda, or drive a car, you can be certain that you are affected by the loss of tropical forests. Biologically, we are losing the richest regions on earth when, each minute, a piece of tropical forest the size of ten city blocks vanishes. As many as five million species of plants, animals and insects, 40 to 50 percent of all living things, live there, and are being irrevocably lost faster than they can be found and described. Their loss is incalculable. Take medicine, for example. Fewer than one percent of tropical forest plants have been examined for their chemical compounds. Nonetheless, scientists have integrated a wealth of important plants into our everyday lives. The West African Calabar bean is used to treat glaucoma, while the sankerfoot plant of India yields reserpine, essential for treating hypertension. A West African vine provides the basis for stroplantus, a heart medicine. Quinine, an alkaloid derived from boiling the bark of the cinchona tree, is used to prevent and treat malaria. In fact, of the 3 000 plants in the world known to contain anti-cancer properties, 2100 are from the tropical rain forest. Then there is rubber. For many uses, only natural rubber from trees will do, synthetics are not good enough. Today, over half of the world"s commercial rubber is produced in Malaysia and Indonesia, while the Amazon"s rubber industry produces much of the world"s four million tons. Adding ammonia to rubber produces latex which is used for surgical gloves, balloons, adhesives, and foam rubber. Latex, plus a weak mixture of acid results in sheet rubber used for footwear and many sporting goods. Literally thousands of tropical plants are valuable for their industrial uses. Many provide fiber and canes for furniture, soundproofing and insulation. Palm oil, a product of the tropics, brings to your table margarine, cooking oil, bakery products, and candles. The sap from Amazonian copaila trees, poured straight into a fuel tank, can power a truck. At present, 20 percent of Brazil"s diesel fuel comes from this tree. An expanded use of this might reduce our dependency on irreplaceable fossil fuels. Many scientists assert that deforestation contributes to the greenhouse effect. As we destroy forest, we lose their ability to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Carbon dioxide level could double within the next half-century warming the earth by as much as 4.5 degrees. The result? A partial meltdown of the polar ice caps, raising sea levels as much as 24 feet. A rise of 15 feet would threaten anyone living within 35 miles of the coast. Far-fetched? Perhaps, but scientists warn that by the time we realize the severe effects of tropical deforestation, it will be 20 years too late. Can tropical deforestation affect our everyday lives? We only have to look at the catalogued tropical forests and the abundance of wondrous products from which we benefit every day to know the answer. After all, the next discovery could be a cure for cancer or the common cold, or the answer to feeding the hungry, or fuelling our world for centuries to come.

单选题Despite the fact that they were ______when they married, alter 30 years they live together harmoniously.

单选题Is it proper for the government to______public opinion through self-serving, one-sided joumalism?

单选题The Bay filled the middle distance, stretching out of sight on both sides, and one"s eye naturally traveled in a great sight-seeing arc: skimming along the busy Shoreline Freeway, swerving out across the Bay via the long Esseph Bridge to the city"s dramatic skyline, dark downtown skyscrapers posed against white residential hills, from which it leapt across the graceful curves of the Silver Span suspension bridge, gateway to the Pacific, to alight on the green slopes of Miranda County. This vast panorama was agitated, even early in the morning, by every known form of transportation—ships, yachts, cars, trucks, trains, planes, helicopters and hovercrafts—all in simultaneous motion, reminding Philip of the brightly illustrated cover of a children"s book. It was indeed, he thought, a perfect marriage of Nature and Civilization, this view, where one might take in at a glance the consummation of man"s technological skill and the finest splendours of the natural world. The harmony he perceived in the scene was, he knew, illusory. Just out of sight to his left a cloud of smoke hung over the great military and industrial port of Ashland, and to his right the oil refineries of St Gabriel fumed into the limpid air. The Bay, which winked so prettily in the morning sun, was, people said, poisoned by industrial waste and untreated effluent. For all that, Philip thought, almost guiltily, framed by his living-room window and seen at this distance, the view still looked very good indeed. Morris Zapp was less entranced with his view—a vista of dank back gardens, rotting sheds and dripping laundry, huge ill-looking trees, grimy roofs, factory chimneys and church spires—but he had discarded this criterion at a very early stage of looking for accommodation in an English industrial town. You were lucky, he had quickly discovered, if you could find a place that could be kept at a temperature appropriate to human organisms, equipped with the more rudimentary amenities of civilized life, and decorated in a combination of colours and patterns that didn"t make you want to vomit on sight. He had taken an apartment on the top floor of a huge old house owned by an Irish doctor and his extensive family. Dr O"shea had converted the attic with his own hands for the use of an aged mother, and it was to the recent death of this relative, the doctor impressed upon him, that Morris owed the good fortune of finding such enviable accommodation vacant. Morris didn"t see this as a selling point himself, but O"shea seemed to think that the apartment"s sentimental associations were worth at least an extra five dollars a week to an American torn from the bosom of his own family.