单选题Teddy came to my ______ with a cheque of $200 to pay my room rate, after I phoned him that my wallet had been stolen.

单选题Despite some dire predictions at the weekend, financial markets have been remarkably ______ in the face of the Paris attacks, which may just cause a short-term disruption to economic life.

单选题On Cloning a Human Being It is now theoretically possible to recreate an identical creature from any animal or plant, from the DNA contained in the nucleus of any somatic cell. A single plant root-tip cell can be teased and seduced into conceiving a perfect copy of the whole plant; a frog's intestinal epithelial cell possesses the complete instructions needed for a new, same frog. If the technology were further advanced, you could do this with a human being, and there are now startled predictions all over the place that this will in fact be done, someday, in order to provide a version of immortality for carefully selected, especially valuable people. The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry, and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers. Cloning is the most dismaying of prospects, mandating as it does the elimination of sex with only a metaphoric elimination of death as compensation. It is almost no comfort to know that one's cloned, identical surrogate lives on, especially when the living will very likely involve edging one's real, now aging self off to side, sooner or later. It is hard to imagine anything like filial affection or respect for a single, unmated nucleus; harder still to think of one's new, self-generated self as anything but an absolute, desolate orphan. Not to mention the complex interpersonal relationship involved in raising one's self from infancy, teaching the language, enforcing discipline, instilling good manners, and the like. How would you feel if you became an incorrigible juvenile delinquent by proxy, at the age of fifty-five? The public questions are obvious. Who is to be selected, and on what qualifications? How to handle the risks of misused technology, such as self-determined cloning by the rich and powerful but socially objectionable, or the cloning by governments of dumb, docile masses for the world's work? What will be the effect on all the uncloned rest of us human sameness? After all, we've accustomed ourselves through hundreds of millennia to the continual exhilaration of uniqueness; each of us is totally different, in a fundamental sense, from all the other four billion. Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of human non-selfness, precise sameness, is terrifying, when you think about it. Well, don't think about it, because it isn't a probable possibility, not even as a long shot for the distant future, in my opinion. I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins. The time required for the experiment is only one of the problems, but a formidable one. Suppose you wanted to clone a prominent, spectacularly successful diplomat, to look after the Middle East problems of the distant future. You'd have to catch him and persuade him, probably not very hard to do, and extirpate a cell. But then you'd have to wait for him to grow up through embryonic life and then for at least forty years more, and you'd have to be sure all observers remained patient and unmeddlesome through his unpromising, ambiguous childhood and adolescence. Moreover, you'd have to be sure of recreating his environment, perhaps down to the last detail. "Environment" is a word which really means people, so you'd have to do a lot more cloning than just the diplomat himself. This is a very important part of the cloning problem, largely overlooked in our excitement about the cloned individual himself. You don't have to agree all the way with B. F. Skinner to acknowledge that the environment does make a difference, and when you examine what we really mean by the word "environment" it comes down to other human beings. We use euphemisms and jargon for this, like "social forces," "cultural influences," even Skinner's "verbal community," but what is meant is the dense crowd of nearby people who talk to, listen to, smile or frown at, give to, withhold from, nudge, push, caress, or flail out at the individual. No matter what the genome says, these people have a lot to do with shaping a character. Indeed, if all you had was the genome, and no people around, you'd grow a sort of vertebrate plant, nothing more. So, to start with, you will undoubtedly need to clone the parents. No question about this. This means the diplomat is out, even in theory, since you couldn't have gotten cells from both his parents at the time when he was himself just recognizable as an early social treasure. You'd have to limit the list of clones to people already certified as sufficiently valuable for the effort, with both parents still alive. The parents would need cloning and, for consistency, their parents as well. I suppose you'd also need the usual informed-consent forms, filled out and signed, not easy to get if I know parents, even harder for grandparents. But this is only the beginning. It is the whole family that really influences the way a person turns out, not just the parents, according to current psychiatric thinking. Clone the family. Then what? The way each member of the family develops has already been determined by the environment set around him, and this environment is more people, people outside the family, schoolmates, acquaintances, lovers, enemies, car-pool partners, even, in special circumstances, peculiar strangers across the aisle on the subway. Find them, and clone them. But there is no end to the protocol. Each of the outer contacts has his own surrounding family, and his and their outer contacts. Clone them all. To do the thing properly, with any hope of ending up with a genuine duplicate of a single person, you really have no choice. You must clone the world, no less. We are not ready for an experiment of this size, nor, I should think, are we willing. For one thing, it would mean replacing today's world by an entirely identical world to follow immediately, and this means no new, natural, spontaneous, random, chancy children. No children at all, except for the manufactured doubles of those now on the scene. Plus all those identical adults, including all of today's politicians, all seen double. It is too much to contemplate. Moreover, when the whole experiment is finally finished, fifty years or so from now, how could you get a responsible scientific reading on the outcome? Somewhere in there would be the original clonee, probably lost and overworked, now well into middle age, but everyone around him would be precise duplicates of today's everyone. It would be today's same world, filled to overflowing with duplicates of today's people and their same, duplicated problems, probably all resentful at having had to go through our whole thing all over, sore enough at the clonee to make endless trouble for him, if they found him. And obviously, if the whole thing were done precisely right, they would still be casting about for ways to solve the problem of universal dissatisfaction, and sooner or later they'd surely begin to look around at each other, wondering who should be cloned for his special value to society, to get us out of all this. And so it would go, in regular cycles, perhaps forever. I once lived through a period where I wondered what Hell could be like, and I stretched my imagination to try to think of a perpetual sort of damnation. I have to confess, I never thought of anything like this. I have an alternative suggestion, if you're looking for a way out. Set cloning aside, and don't try it. Instead, go in the other direction. Look for ways to get mutations more quickly, new variety, different songs. Fiddle around, if you must fiddle, but never with ways to keep things the same, no matter who, not even yourself. Heaven, somewhere ahead, has got to be a change.

单选题The asteroids in our solar system may be remnants of a primeval cloud of dust.

单选题The notion that a parasite can alter the behavior of a host organism is not mere fiction; indeed, the phenomenon is not even ______.

单选题David Maraniss choked up when he saw the two-minute Chrysler advertisement during the Super Bowl, the annual football extravaganza, with its images of smokestacks, ice skaters and Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry" murals. Suddenly he realized how much he still cared for his birthplace, where he spent the first six and a half years of his life. So much so that he decided to write his 12th book about the city, when it was at the peak of its economic, political and cultural power. He picked the early 1960s, from the autumn of 1962 to the spring of 1964. At the time Detroit was the economic engine of America. In January 1963 Life magazine published a story under the headline "Glow from Detroit Spreads Everywhere". The factories of Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and American Motors were firing on all cylinders. The increase in women drivers, the trend towards two-car families, the rising income of the post-war baby boomers and the promise of foreign markets inspired tremendous optimism for the industry's growth. The annual motor show was the biggest and most important event of its kind, the Academy Awards on wheels; on occasion even the vice-president came. Detroit was also a center of progressive politics and the civil-rights movement. Mr Maraniss devotes an entire chapter to Walter Reuther, the memorable boss of the most powerful union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). His parents, German immigrants, raised him with visions of social justice and workers' rights. Reuther was an idealist but also a pragmatist, which made him enemies on the left as well as the right. George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan in 1963, called him "the most dangerous man in Detroit" because of his ability to bring about "the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing norms of society". Reuther was concerned with civil rights almost as much as with workers' rights. He invited Martin Luther King to the UAW's 25th-anniversary dinner and afterwards distributed copies of King's speech to the rank-and-file. When hundreds of protesters were jailed after King's Birmingham campaign of civil disobedience, Reuther dispatched two UAW staffers with $ 160, 000 in money belts to bail them out of jail. "It could be said that to a significant degree Detroit and its autoworkers were the civil rights movement's bank," Mr Maraniss writes. In Detroit in June 1963 King led the "Walk to Freedom", then the largest civil-rights march, and delivered a version of his "I Have a Dream" speech which he would give nine weeks later at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. For all Detroit's glow, the storm clouds were already gathering in the early 1960s. Mr Maraniss cites a study by Wayne State University in 1963 that predicted the population of Detroit would drop from nearly 1.7 m to 1.2m between 1960 and 1970 and continue to dwindle. "Productive persons who pay taxes are moving out of the city, leaving behind the non-productive," the report noted. It also mentioned that in 1960 Detroit's population was 28. 9% black and forecast that by 1970 the city would be 44. 3% black, pointing out that blacks who had the resources moved to the suburbs "with the same urgency as whites". The report turned out to be unusually prescient. In spite of the efforts of Reuther, Cavanagh, King and others, Detroit was rocked by one of the worst race riots in history in 1967. From then on the pace of the city's decline quickened. By the time Mr Maraniss was writing his meticulously researched book, which at times provides almost too much detail for the uninitiated, Detroit had declared bankruptcy. Its population was 83% black, its workers were largely unskilled and the city's headcount had shrunk to 688, 000. The city that had given America so much was in desperate need of help.

单选题The growth of part-time and flexible working patterns, and of training and retraining scheme, ______ more women to take advantage of employment opportunities.

单选题Alexander Woollcott's flamboyant personality combined sharpness of wit with sentimentality.

单选题Auctions are public sales of goods, conducted by an officially approved auctioneer. He asked the crowed assembled in the auction-room to make offers, or "bids" , for the various items on sale. He encourages buyers to bid higher figures and finally names the highest bidder as the buyer of thegoods. This is called "knocking down" the goods, for the bidding ends when the auctioneer bangs a small hammer on a table at which he stands. This is often set on a raised platform called a rostrum. The ancient Romans probably invented sales by auction, and the English word comes from the Latin Autcio, meaning "increase. " The Romans usually sold in this way the spoils taken in war; these sales were called subhasta, meaning " under the spear," a spear being stuck in the ground as a signal for a crowd to gather, In English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, goods were often sold "by the candle" ; a short candle was lit by the auctioneer, and bids could be made while it stayed alight. Practically all goods whose qualities vary are sold by auction. Among these are coffee, hides, skins, wool, tea, cocoa, furs, spices, frit and vegetables and wines. Auction sales are also usual for land and property, antique furniture, pictures, rare books, old china and similar works of art. The auction-rooms as Christie"s and Sotheby"s in London and New York are world-famous. An auction is usually advertised beforehand with full particulars of the articles to be sold and where and when they can be viewed by prospective buyers. If the advertisement cannot give full details , catalogues are printed, and each group of goods to be sold together, called a " lot," is usually given a number. The auctioneer need not begin with Lot I and continue in numerical order; he may wait until he registers the fact that certain dealers are in the room and then produce the lots they are likely to be interested in. The auctioneer"s services are paid for in the form of a percentage of the price the goods are sold for. The auctioneer therefore has a direct interest in pushing up the bidding as high as possible.

单选题The doctor proposed that she stay for one more week, her discharge from the hospital ______ later on.

单选题One theory about intelligence sees ______as the logical structure underlying thinking and insists that since animals are mute, they must be______as well.

单选题When we talk about giving universities greater autonomy to recruit students, people may be concerned about possible fraud and preferential treatment enjoyed by students from wealthy or powerful families.

单选题Different purposes for which money is borrowed result in the creation of different kinds of financial assets, having different maturities, risks, and other features, thus different financial markets.

单选题Research into the validity of selection methods has consistently shown that the unstructured interview, ______ the interviewer asks any questions he or she likes, is a poor predictor of future job performance.

单选题All was darkness ______ an occasional glimmer in the distance.

单选题Please do not be______by his offensive remarks since he is merely trying to attract attention.

单选题An underlying assumption of most market research is that people are continually ______ financial decisions based on their desire for goods that give them the most satisfaction.

单选题Passage One Discussion of the assimilation of Puerto Ricans in the United States has focused on two factors: social standing and the loss of national culture. In general, excessive stress is placed on one factor or the other, depending on whether fine commentator is North American or Puerto Rica. Many American social scientists, such as Oscar Handlin, Joseph Fitzpatrick, and Oscar Lewis, consider Puerto Ricans as the most recent in a long line of ethnic entrants to occupy the lowest rung on the social ladder. Such a "socio-demographic" approach tends to regard assimilation as a benign process, taking for granted increased economic advantage and inevitable cultural integration, in a supposedly egalitarian context. However, this approach fails to take into account the colonial nature of the Puerto Rican case, with this group, unlike their European predecessors, coming from a nation politically subordinated to the United States. Even the "radical" critiques of this mainstream research model, such as the critique developed in Divided Society, attach the issue of ethnic assimilation too mechanically to factors of economic and social mobility, and are thus unable to illuminate the cultural subordination of Puerto Ricans as a colonial minority. In contrasts, the "Colonialist" approach of island-based writers such as Eduardo Seda-Bonilla, Manuel Maldonado-Denis, and Lius Nieves-Falcon tends to view assimilation as the forced loss of national culture in an unequal contest with imposed foreign values. There is, of course, a strong tradition of culture accommodation among other Puerto Rican thinkers. The writings of Eugenio Fernandez Mendez clearly exemplify this tradition, and many supporters of Puerto Rico's commonwealth status share the same universalizing orientation. But the Puerto Rican intellectuals who have written most about the assimilation process in the United States all advance cultural nationalist views, advocating the preservation of minority cultural distinctions and rejecting what they see as the subjugation of colonial nationalities. This cultural and political emphasis is appropriate, but the colonialist thinkers misdirect it, overlooking the class relations at work in both Puerto Rican and North American history. They pose the clash of national cultures as an absolute polarity, with each culture understood as static and undifferentiated. Yet both the Puerto Rican and North American traditions have been subject to constant challenge from cultural forces within their own societies; forces that may move toward each other in ways that cannot be written off as mere "assimilation". Consider, for example, the indigenous and Afro-Caribbean traditions in Puerto Rican' culture and how they influence and are influenced by other Caribbean cultures and Black cultures in the United States. The elements of Coercion and inequality, so central to cultural contact according to the colonialist framework, play no role in this kind of convergence of racially and ethnically different elements of the same class.

单选题The air crash led to the ______ of the diplomatic relations between the two countries.

单选题Because outlaws were denied ______ under medieval law, anyone could raise a hand against them with legal ______.