单选题{{B}}Passage 2{{/B}} There are four basic types of competition in business that form a continuum from pure competition through monopolistic competition and oligopoly (商品供应垄断) to monopoly. At one end of the continuum, pure competition results when every company has a similar product. Companies that deal in commodities such as wheat or corn are often involved in pure competition. In pure competition, it is often the ease and efficiency of distribution that influences purchase. In contrast, in monopolistic competition, several companies may compete for the sale of items that may be substituted. The classic example of monopolistic competition is coffee and tea. If the price of one is perceived as too high, consumers may begin to purchase the other. Coupons and other discounts (折扣) are often used as part of a marketing strategy to influence sales. Oligopoly occurs when a few companies dominate the sales of a product or service. For example, only five airline carriers control more than 70 percent of all ticket sales in the United States. In oligopoly, serious competition is not considered desirable because it would result in reduced revenue for every company in the group. Although price wars do occur, in which all companies offer substantial savings to customers, a somewhat similar tendency to raise prices simultaneously is also usual. Finally, monopoly occurs when only one firm sells the product. Some monopolies have been tolerated for producers of goods and services that have been considered basic or essential, including electricity and water. In these cases, it is government control, rather than competition, that protects and influences sales.

单选题The director of the research institute came in person to______ that everything was all fight.

单选题Right now there is a sale of 19th-century European paintings and sculpture in the museum.

单选题Students at these schools test far below the state average in reading, and their scores have improved only______

单选题Finally, careful prioritization is no alternative to the adequate ______ of the science base.

单选题It didn't seem to have ______ to her that once she was addicted to drug smoking, she could hardly give it up. But it did happen. A. happened B. took place C. occurred D. came about

单选题A little more than a century ago, Michael Faraday, the noted British physicist, managed to gain audience with a group of high government officials, to demonstrate an electro-chemical principle, in the hope of gaining support for his work. After observing the demonstrations closely, one of the officials remarked bluntly, "It's a fascinating demonstration, young man, but just what practical application will come of this?" "I don't know," replied Faraday, "but I do know that 100 years from now you'll be taxing them." From the demonstration of a principle to the marketing of products derived from that principle is often a long way, involved series of steps. The speed and effectiveness with which these steps are taken are closely related to the history of management, the art of getting things done. Just as management applies to the wonders that have evolved from Faraday and other inventors, so it applied some 4,000 years ago to the working of the great Egyptian and Mesopotamian import and export firms...to Hannibal's remarkable feat of crossing the Alps in 218 B.C. with 90,000 foot soldiers, 12,000 horsemen and a "conveyor belt" of 40 elephants.. .or to the early Christian Church, with its world-shaking concepts of individual freedom and equality. These ancient innovators were deeply involved in the problems of authority, divisions of labor, discipline, unity of command, clarity of direction and the other basic factors that are so meaningful to management today. But the real impetus to management as an emerging profession was the Industrial Revolution. Originating in 18-century England, it was triggered by a series of classic inventions and new processes; among them John Kay's Flying Shuttle in 1733, James Hargrove's Spinning Jenny in 1770, Samuel Compton's Mule Spinner in 1779 and Edmund Cartwright's Power Loom in 1785.

单选题The Supreme Court's decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering. Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of "double effect", a centuries-old moral principle holding that an action having two effects — a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen — is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect. Doctors have used that principle in recent years to justify using high doses of morphine to control terminally ill patients' pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient. Nancy Dubler, director of Montefiore Medical Center, contends that the principle will shield doctors who "until now have very, very strongly insisted that they could not give patients sufficient mediation to control their pain if that might hasten death." George Annas, chair of the health law department at Boston University, maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. "It's like surgery," he says, "We don't call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn't intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you're a physician, you can risk your patient's suicide as long as you don't intend their suicide." On another level, many in the medical community acknowledge that the assisted-suicide debate has been fueled in part by the despair of patients for whom modern medicine has prolonged the physical agony of dying. Just three weeks before the Court's ruling on physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science(NAS)released a two-volume report, Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life. It identifies the undertreatment of pain and the aggressive use of "ineffectual and forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying" as the twin problems of end-of-life care. The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospices, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life. Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well-meaning medical initiatives translate into better care. "Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering," to the extent that it constitutes "systematic patient abuse". He says medical licensing boards "must make it clear that painful deaths are presumptively ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension".

单选题In addition to curricula, programs, and comprehensive support services, schools ______ sexist bias, harassment, and violence, so a number of school districts and states are currently adopting sexual harassment policies. A. have to make a final stand for B. must make an unequivocal stand against C. have to adopt a firm stand to D. must keep an unambiguous stand over

单选题The criminal was told he would be ______ from punishment if he said what he knew about the murder.

单选题The countermeasures the nation's main air carriers would take to prevent any sharp drop in travel demand may include ______. Ⅰ. seeking government financial assistance Ⅱ. asking for low tax rate Ⅲ. promoting more bankruptcies and forcing some weak airline companies into liquidation

单选题A ______ examination for the post of department manager will be held next Tuesday.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} Fried foods have long been frowned upon. Nevertheless, the skillet is about our handiest and most useful piece of kitchen equipment. Stalwart lumberjacks and others engaged in active labor requiring 4,000 calories per day or more will take approximately one-third of their rations prepared in this fashion. Meat, eggs, and French toast cooked in this way are served in millions of homes daily. Apparently the consumers are not beset-with more signs of indigestion than afflict those who insist upon broiling, roasting, or boiling. Some years ago one of our most eminent physiologists investigated the digestibility of fried potatoes. He found that the pan variety was more easily broken down for assimilation than when deep fat was employed. The latter, however, dissolved within the alimentary tract more readily than the boiled type. Furthermore, he learned, by watching the progress of the contents of the stomach by means of the fluoroscope, that fat actually accelerated the rate of digestion. Now all this is quite in contrast with "authority". Volumes have been written on nutrition, and everywhere the dictum has been accepted--no fried edibles of any sort for children. A few will go so far as to forbid this style of cooking wholly. Now and then an expert will be bold enough to admit that he uses them himself. The absence of discomfort being explained on the ground that he possesses a powerful gastric apparatus. We can of course sizzle perfectly good articles to death so that they will be leathery and tough. But thorough heating, in the presence of shortening, is not the awful crime that it has been labeled. Such dishes stimulate rather than retard contractions of the gall bladder. Thus it is that bile mixes with the nutriment shortly after it leaves the stomach. We don't need to allow our foodstuffs to become oil-soaked, but other than that, there seems to be no basis for the widely heralded prohibition against this method. But notions become fixed. The first condemnation probably arose because an "oracle" suffered from dyspepsia, which he ascribed to some fried item on the menu. The theory spread. Others agreed with him, and after a time the doctrine became incorporated in our textbooks. The belief is now tradition rather than a proved fact. It should have been refuted long since, as experience has demonstrated its falsity.

单选题{{B}}Passage 3{{/B}} The word science is heard so often in modern times that almost everybody has some notion of its meaning. On the other hand, its definition is difficult for many people. The meaning of the term is confused, but everyone should understand its meaning and objectives. Just to make the explanation as simple as possible, suppose science is defined as classified knowledge (facts). Even in the true sciences distinguishing fact from fiction is not always easy. For this reason great care should be taken to distinguish between beliefs and truths. There is no danger as long as a clear difference is made between temporary and proved explanations. For example, hypotheses and theories are attempts to explain natural phenomena. From these positions the scientist continues to experiment and observe until they are proved or discredited. The exact status of any explanation should be clearly labeled to avoid confusion. The objectives of science are primarily the discovery and the subsequent understanding of the unknown. Man cannot be satisfied with recognizing that secrets exist in nature or that questions are unanswerable; he must solve them. Toward that end specialists in the field of biology and related fields of interest are directing much of their time and energy. Actually, two basic approaches lead to the discovery of new information. One, aimed at satisfying curiosity, is referred to as pure science. The other is aimed at using knowledge for specific purposes—for instance, improving health, raising standards of living, or creating new consumer products. In this case knowledge is put to economic use. Such an approach is referred to as applied science. Sometimes practical-minded people miss the point of pure science in thinking only of its immediate application for economic rewards. Chemists responsible for many of the discoveries could hardly have anticipated that their findings would one day result in application of such a practical nature as those directly related to life and death. The discoveries of one hit of information opens the door to the discovery of another. Some discoveries seem so simple that one is amazed they were not made years agog however, one should remember that the construction of the microscope had to precede the discovery of the cell. The host of scientists dedicating their lives to pure science are not apologetic about ignoring the practical side of their discoveries; they know from experience that most knowledge is eventually applied.

单选题The government will ______ a statement about tax increase soon.

单选题Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period before the South began to become self-consciously and distinctively "Southern" --the decades after 1815. Consequently, the cultural history of Britain's North American empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been writ ten almost as if the Southern colonies had never existed. The American culture that emerged during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras has been depicted as having been simply an extension of New England Puritan culture. However, Professor Davis has recently argued that the South stood apart from the rest of American society during this early period, following its own unique pattern of cultural development. The case for Southern distinctiveness rests upon two related premises: first, that the cultural similarities among the five Southern colonies were far more impressive than the differences, and second, that what made those colonies alike also made them different from the other colonies. The first, for which Davis offers an enormous amount of evidence, can be accepted without major reservations; the second is far more problematic. What makes the second premise problematic is the use of the Puritan colonies as a basis for comparison. Quite properly, Davis decries the excessive influence ascribed by historians to the Puritans in the formation of American culture. Yet Davis inadvertently adds weight to such ascriptions by using the Puritans as the standard against which to assess the achievements and contributions of Southern colonials. Throughout, Davis focuses on the important, and undeniable, differences between the Southern and Puritan colonies in motives for and patterns of early settlement, in attitudes toward nature and Native Americans, and in the degree of receptivity to metropolitan cultural influences. However, recent scholarship has strongly suggested that those aspects of early New England culture that seem to have been most distinctly Puritan, such as the strong religious orientation and the communal impulse, were not even typical of New England as a whole, but were largely confined to the two colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Thus, what in contrast to the Puritan colonies appears to Davis to be peculiarly Southern--aquisitiveness, a strong interest in politics and the law, and a tendency to cultivate metropolitan cultural models--was not only more typically English than the cultural patterns exhibited by Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also almost certainly characteristic of most other early modern British colonies from Barbados north to Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Within the larger framework of American colonial life, then, not the Southern but the Puritan colonies appear to have been distinctive, and even they seem to have been rapidly assimilating to the dominant cultural patterns by the late Colonial period.

单选题We were unable to reach a decision because we felt that the speaker had been ______ and had avoided answering many of our questions.

单选题He was on a diet, though the food ______ him enormously. [A] inspired [B] tempted [C] overcame [D] encouraged

单选题If a mother pushes her small son in a swing, giving only a light force each time he returns, eventually he will be swinging quite high. The child can do this for himself by using his legs to increase the motion, but both the mother"s push and the child"s leg movements must occur at the proper moment, or the extent of the swing will not increase. In physics, increasing the swing is increasing the amplitude; the length of the rope on the swing determines its natural oscillation period. This ability of an object to move periodically or to vibrate when stimulated by a force operating in its natural period is called resonance. Resonance is observed many times without consciously thinking about it; for example, one may find an annoying vibration or shimmy in an automobile, caused by a loose engine mount vibrating with increasing amplitude because of an out-of-round tire. The bulge on the tire slaps the pavement with each revolution; at the natural resonance point of the engine mount, it will begin to vibrate. Such vibrations can result in considerable damage if allowed to persist. Another destructive example of resonance is the shattering of a crystal goblet by the production of a musical tone at the natural resonant point of goblet. The energy of the sound waves causes vibration in the glass; as its amplitude increases, the motion in the glass exceeds the elasticity of the goblet, and it shatters. An instrument called a tachometer makes use of the principle of resonance. It consists of many tiny bars, loosely fastened together and arranged so that each bar can slide independently of the others. Movement of the bars causes changes in a dial. When placed next to a rotating motor or engine, the tachometer picks up slight vibrations which are transferred to the resonant bars. These bars begin to move, and the resulting dial may be read to find the revolutions per minute of the motor very quickly.