单选题We will visit Huangshan next year ______ we have enough money.
单选题If you keep on trying something, the day will come when you can do it well and with great______.
单选题Ravaged by pollution and war, many famous monuments have become eroded
and {{U}}stained{{/U}}.
A. discolored
B. dismembered
C. displaced
D. distinctive
单选题We"ve______salt. Ask Mrs. Jones to lend us some.
单选题She"s playing so well this year that people expect her to______all the big prizes again.
单选题According to a private study, the worst US economic recession in 70 years is forcing senior citizens out of retirement, leaving them fighting for jobs in a weak labor market or risking homelessness.
The study by Experience Works, showed 46 percent of the 2,000 low income people over 55 years who participated needed to find work to keep their homes. Nearly half of them had been searching for work for more than a year.
Experience Works is the nation"s largest nonprofit provider of community service, training and employment opportunities for older workers.
"These people are at the age where they understandably thought their job-searching years were behind them," said Cynthia Metzler, president and CEO of Experience Works.
"But here they are, many in their 60s, 70s and beyond, desperate to find work so they can keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. "
According to the study, many of the participants had no intention of working past their 60th birthday, but had to change plans after being laid off or following the death of a spouse. Over a third of the participants had retired.
Huge medical bills due to a personal illness or that of a spouse were also reasons for coming out of retirement, the survey found. The longest and deepest economic slump since the 1930s is making finding a job for the low-income elderly workers a difficult challenge.
According to Labor Department data, there were 2 million unemployed workers over the age of 55 in August, an increase of 69 percent from the same period last year. Between August 2008 and August this year, the number of unemployed workers 75 years and older increased by 33 percent.
The unemployment rate among workers 55 years and older was 6.7 percent in August after shooting to a record 7.1 percent in July. The national unemployment rate was at 9.7 percent in August, the highest in 26 years.
The Experience Works study found that 46 percent of the elderly jobseekers were sometimes forced to choose between paying rent, buying food or medication. Almost three-quarters believed their age made it harder to compete for jobs with younger workers.
"This study underscores the need to create policies that remove barriers to employment for older workers and provide additional programs and services specifically aimed at helping older people re-enter the work force or remain working," said Metzler.
单选题Nobody saw the CEO at the seminar; he ______ at it
单选题An important point in the development of a governmental agency is the codification of its controlling practices. The study of law or jurisprudence is usually concerned with the codes, and practices of specific governments, past or present. It is also concerned with certain questions upon which a functional analysis of behavior has some beating. What is a law? What role does a law play in governmental control? In particular, what effect does it have upon the behavior of the controller and of the members of the governmental agency itself?
A law usually has two important features. In the first place, it specifies behavior. The behavior is usually not described topographically but rather in terms of its effect upon others—the effect that is the object of governmental control. When we are told, for example, that an individual has "committed perjury", we are not told what he has actually said. "Robbery" and "assault" do not refer to specific forms of response. Only properties of behavior which are aversive to others are mentioned—in perjury the lack of a customary correspondence between a verbal response and certain factual circumstances, in robbery the removal of positive reinforces, and in assault the aversive character of physical injury. In the second place, a law specifies or implies a consequence, usually punishment. A law is thus a statement of a contingency of reinforcement maintained by a governmental agency. The contingency may have prevailed as a controlling practice prior to its codification as a law, or it may represent a new practice which goes into effect with the passage of the law. Laws are thus both descriptions of past practices and assurances of similar practices in the future. A law is a rule of conduct in the sense that it specifies the consequences of certain actions which in turn "rule" behavior.
The effect of a law upon the controlling agency. The government of a large group requires an elaborate organization, the practices of which may be made more consistent and effective by codification. How codes of law affect governmental agents is the principal subject of jurisprudence. The behavioral processes are complex, although presumably not novel. In order to maintain or "enforce" contingencies of governmental control, an agency must establish the fact that an individual has behaved illegally and must interpret a code to determine the punishment. It must then carry out the punishment. These labors are usually divided among special subdivisions of the agency. The advantages gained when the individual is "not under man but under law" have usually been obvious, and the great codifiers of law occupy places of honor in the history of civilization. Codification does not, however, change the essential nature of governmental action nor remedy all its defects.
单选题He ______ a lot of pleasure from meeting new people.
单选题The little boy was very ambitious; he's filled with ______for knowledge.
单选题The little girls were commended for their wonderful dance presentation.
单选题He displayed______ignorance in handling what was an only routine personnel problem.
单选题He has been transferred to the University of Maryland Medical Center and is waiting to ______surgery.
单选题The two most important______in making a cake are flour and sugar.
单选题The writer Thoreau had no liking for______. He wrote in his journal, "That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."
单选题In her time, Isadora Duncan was ______ today a liberated woman.
单选题Major companies are already in pursuit of commercial applications of the new biology. They dream of placing enzymes in the automobile to monitor exhaust and send data on pollution to a microprocessor that will then adjust the engine. They speak of what the New York Times calls "metal-hungry microbes that might be used to mine valuable trace metals from ocean water." They have already demanded and won the right to patent new life forms. Nervous critics, including many scientists, worry that there is corporate, national, international, and inter-scientific rivalry in the entire biotechnological field. They create images not of oil spills, but of "microbe spills" that could spread disease and destroy entire populations. The creation and accidental release of extremely poisonous microbes, however, is only one cause for alarm. Completely rational and respectable scientists are talking about possibilities that stagger the imagination. Should we breed people with cow-like stomachs so they can digest grass and hay, thereby relieving the food problem by modifying us to eat lower down on the food chain? Should we biologically alter workers to fit the job requirement, for example, creating pilots with faster reaction times or assembly-line workers designed to do our monotonous work for us? Should we attempt to eliminate "inferior" people and breed a "super-race"? (Hitler tried this, but without the genetic weaponry that may soon issue from our laboratories.) Should we produce soldiers to do our fighting? Should we use genetic forecasting to pre-eliminate "unfit" babies? Should we grow reserve organs for ourselves, each of us having, as it were, a "savings bank" full of spare kidney, livers, or hands? Wild as these notions may sound, everyone has its advocates (and opposers) in the scientific community as well as its striking commercial applications. As two critics of genetic engineering, Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, state in their book Who Should Play God? "Broad scale genetic engineering will probably be introduced to America much the same way as assembly lines, automobiles, vaccines, computers and all the other technologies. As each new genetic advance becomes commercially practical, a new consumer need will be exploited and a market for the new technology will be created."
单选题He was so ______ by his work that he did not notice that other employees had already left.
单选题______, he could not lift the weight.
单选题 On New Year's Day, 50,000 inmates in Kenyan jails went
without lunch. This was not some mass hunger strike to highlight poor living
conditions. It was an extraordinary humanitarian gesture: the money that would
have been spent on their lunches went to the charity Food Aid to help feed an
estimated 3.5 million Kenyans who, because of a severe drought, are threatened
with starvation. The drought is big news in Africa, affecting huge areas
of east Africa and the Horn. If you are reading this in the west, however, you
may not be aware of it—the media is not interested in old stories. Even if you
do know about the drought, you may not be aware that it is devastating one group
of people disproportionately: the pastoralists. There are 20 million nomadic or
semi- nomadic herders in this region, and they are fast becoming some of the
poorest people in the continent. Their plight encapsulates Africa's perennial
problem with drought and famine. How so? It comes down to the
reluctance of governments, aid agencies and foreign lenders to support the
herders' traditional way of life. Instead they have tended to try to turn them
into commercial ranchers or agriculturalists, even though it has been
demonstrated time and again that pastoralists are
well adapted to their harsh environments, and that moving livestock
according to the seasons or climatic changes makes their methods far more viable
than agriculture in sub-Saharan drylands. Furthermore, African
pastoralist systems are often more productive, in terms of protein and cash per
hectare, than Australian, American and other African ranches in similar climatic
conditions. They make a substantial contribution to their countries'
national economies. In Kenya, for example, the turnover of the pastoralist
sector is worth $800 million per year. In countries such as Burkina Faso,
Eritrea and Ethiopia, hides from pastoralists' herds make up over 10 percent of
export earnings. Despite this productivity, pastoralists still starve and their
animals perish when drought hits. One reason is that only a trickle of the
profits goes to the herders themselves; the lion's share is pocketed by traders.
This is partly because the herders only sell much of their stock during times of
drought and famine, when they need the cash to buy food, and the terms of trade
in this situation never work in their favour. Another reason is the lack of
investment in herding areas. Funding bodies such as the World
Bank and-USAID tried to address some of the problems in the 1960s, investing
millions of dollars in commercial beef and dairy production. It didn't work.
Firstly, no one bothered to consult the pastoralists about what they wanted.
Secondly, rearing livestock took precedence over human progress. The policies
and strategies of international development agencies more or less mirrored the
thinking of their colonial predecessors. They were based on two false
assumptions: that pastoralism is primitive and inefficient, which led to
numerous failed schemes aimed at converting herders to modern ranching models;
and that Africa's drylands can support commercial ranching. They cannot. Most of
Africa's herders live in areas with unpredictable weather systems that are
totally unsuited to commercial ranching. What the pastoralists
need is support for their traditional lifestyle. Over the past few years,
funders and policy-makers have been starting to get the message. One example is
intervention by governments to ensure that pastoralists get fair prices for
their cattle when they sell them in times of drought, so that they can afford to
buy fodder for their remaining livestock and cereals to keep themselves and
their families alive (the problem in African famines is not so much a lack of
food as a lack of money to buy it). Another example is a drought early-warning
system run by the Kenyan government and the World Bank that has helped avert
livestock deaths. This is all promising, but more needs to be
done. Some African governments still favour forcing pastoralists to
settle. They should heed the latest scientific research demonstrating the
productivity of traditional cattle-herding. Ultimately, sustainable rural
development in pastoralist areas will depend on increasing trade, so one thing
going for them is the growing demand for livestock products: there will likely
be an additional 2 billion consumers worldwide by 2020, the vast majority in
developing countries. To ensure that pastoralists benefit, it will be crucial to
give them a greater say in local policies. Other key tasks include giving a
greater say to women, who play critical roles in livestock production. The rich
world should pay proper attention to the plight of the pastoralists. Leaving
them dependent on foreign food aid is unsustainable and will lead to more
resentment, conflict, environmental degradation and malnutrition. It is in the
rich world's interests to help out.
