单选题Since the World Wide Web was created in 1990, the only way to get onto the internet has been through a computer, a costly box that ______ people as much today as the telephone did 50 years ago.

单选题In the light from the hall, her hair had a golden______.

单选题Passage 4 Choose the best from the following sentences marked A to E to complete the article below. Most economists in the United States seem captivated by the spell of the free market. (16) . A price that is determined by the seller or, for that matter, established by anyone other than the aggregate of consumers seems pernicious. (17) In fact, price-fixing is normal in all industrialized societies because the industrial system itself provides, as an effortless consequence of its own development, the price-fixing that it requires. Modern industrial planning requires and rewards great size. Hence, a comparatively small number of large firms will be competing for the same group of consumers. That each large firm will act with consideration of its own needs and thus avoid selling its products for more than its competitors charge is commonly recognized by advocates of free-market economic theories. (18) Each large firm will thus avoid significant price-cutting, because price-cutting would be prejudicial to the common interest in a stable demand for products. Most economists do not see price-fixing when it occurs because they expect it to be brought about by a number of explicit agreements among large firms; it is not. Moreover, those economists who argue that allowing the free market to operate without interference is the most efficient method of establishing prices have not considered the economies of non-socialist countries other than the United states. These economies employ intentional price-fixin9, usually in an overt fashion. Formal price-fixing by cartel and informal price-fixing by agreements covering the members of an industry are common-place. (19) , the countries that have avoided the first and used the second would have suffered drastically in their economic development. There is no indication that they have. Socialist industry also works within a framework of controlled prices. In the early 1970's, the Soviet Union began to give firms and industries some of the flexibility in adjusting prices that a more informal evolution has accorded the capitalist system (20) ; rather, Soviet firms have been given the power to fix prices.A. But each large firm will also act with full consideration of the needs that it has in common with the other large firms competing for the same customersB. Consequently, nothing seems good or normal that does not accord with the requirements of the free marketC. Economists in the United States have hailed the change as a return to the free market. But Soviet firms are no more subject to prices established by a free market over which they exercise little influence than are capitalist firmsD. Accordingly, it requires a major act of will to think of price-fixing (the determination of prices by the seller) as both "normal" and having a valuable economic functionE. Were there something peculiarly efficient about the free market and inefficient about price-fixing-O.

单选题It is hard to predict how science is going to turn out, and if it is really good science, it is impossible to predict. If the things to be found are actually new, they are by definition unknown in advance. You cannot make choice in this matter. You either have science or you don't, and if you have it you are obliged to accept the surprising and disturbing pieces of information, along with the neat and promptly useful bits. The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. Indeed, I regard this as the major discovery of the past hundred years of biology. It is, in its way, an illuminating piece of news. It would have amazed the brightest minds of the 18th century Enlightenment to be told by any of us how little we know and how bewildering seems the way ahead. It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of 20th century science to the human intellect. In earlier times, we either pretended to understand how things worked or ignored the problem, or simply made up stories to fill the gaps. Now that we have begun exploring in earnest, we are getting glimpses of how huge the questions are, and how far from being answered. Because of this, we are depressed. It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance, the worst spots and here and there the not-so-bad spots, but no true light at the end of the tunnel nor even any tunnels that can yet be trusted. But we are making a beginning, and there ought to be some satisfaction. There are probably no questions we can think up that can't be answered, sooner or later, including even the matter of consciousness. To be sure, there may well be questions we can't think up, ever, and therefore limits to the reach of human intellect, but that is another matter. Within our limits we should be able to work our way through to all our answers, if we keep at it long enough, and pay attention.

单选题The problem is that most local authorities lack the ______ in dealing with the financial problems.

单选题Less than five years ago. Scottish Opera was trapped in a financial quagmire from which few thought it could recover. Today, however, the national company seals its comeback by announcing its most wide-reaching program to date. In an interview with The Times, Alex Reedjik, general director of Scottish Opera, explained that a series of collaborations with other companies would enable it to maximize its output without compromising its budget . He admitted that the partnerships were borne of financial necessity, but argued they would allow the company to reach greater audiences than ever before. "Collaborations are the way forward," he said. "We have often done co-productions in the past but they are more important to us now to enable us to achieve all of our hopes. The problem is that sets are very expensive. If you can share those costs with another organization and not impact on artistic integrity, that is a positive, welcome and necessary thing. Highlights of the 2009-10 season will include a new co-production with New Zealand Opera of Rossini"s The Italian Girl in Algiers, and a joint venture with Opera North The Adventures of Mr. Broucek, by Leos Janacek, featuring a 40-strong choir singing Hussite hymns, along with bagpipes and an organ. An unashamedly Italianate season this Autumn begins with a revival of Giles Havergal"s popular 1994 production of The Elixir of Love. There will also be a revival of the Tony-award winning director Stewart Laing"s production of Puccini"s La Boheme. The turnaround in the company"s fortunes is striking. In 2005, the year before Mr. Reedjik joined the organization, Scottish Opera was forced to make half of its staff, including the entire chorus , redundant and abandon its main-scale productions for a season after accumulating debts of a-round ￡4.5 million. The company"s core grant, which at that time came from the Scottish Arts Council(it is now funded directly by the government)had not risen for several years. However, it had also haemorrhaged funds by staging the hugely expensive Ring Cycle, and according to some critics , had been overspending on props, with rumors of cast members wearing ￡ 300 designer shoes. A ￡ 7 million rescue package put together by the then Labor-led Scottish Executive saved the company from going dark on a permanent basis, but the ease with which it almost went under forced a rethink of priorities . While the company continues to stage several major productions each season, it has also introduced smaller touring works—the acclaimed Five: 15 series—which pairs leading writers with composers to create 15-minute chamber pieces that could be developed into longer productions. The aim, says Mr. Reedjik, is to put on as much opera in Scotland as possible without breaking the bank. So far the strategy seems to be working, with audiences averaging at around 95 ,000 people in the past three years, a rise of almost 50 per cent compared with 2004 -05, the season before the company went dark. "What we are trying to do now is live within our means and raise as much as possible from philanthropic means," said Mr. Reedjik. " We seemed to have dropped out of the news for dumb stuff—now we"re in the news for our interesting work. "

单选题His dog was______by a truck last night and died immediately.

单选题They planned to______in the middle of the night, when the guards were asleep.

单选题He was______to steal the money when he saw it lying on the table.

单选题Many of the over-the-top costumes now on display were actually kept in storage though.

单选题The stout fellow over there is ______ the great magician, Charlie Williams, himself.

单选题In order to escape from the boring and heavy study tasks, many students choose to play video games to feel______.

单选题WeChat has seen monthly active users grow to 468 million worldwide since its 2011 introduction , Chinese students who adopted WeChat while in their home country are now set to be the foundation of the app"s US push.

单选题By the year 2050, scientists probably______a cure for cancer.

单选题There was a period of ______ prior to their divorce, during which she went for a trip around the world and he stayed at home.

单选题Americans often say that there are only two things a person can be sure of in life: death and taxes. Americans do not have a corner on the "death" market, but many people feel that the United States leads the world with the most taxes. Taxes consist of the money which people pay to support their government. There are generally three levels of government in the United States: federal, state, and city; therefore, there are three types of taxes. Salaried people who earn more than a few thousand dollars must pay a certain percentage of their salaries to the federal government. The percentage varies from person to person. It depends on their salaries. The federal government has a graduated income tax, that is, the percentage of the tax 14 to 70 percent increases as a person"s income increases. With the high cost of taxes, people are not very happy on April 15 , when the federal taxes are due. The second tax is for the state government: New York, California, North Dakota, or any of the other forty-seven states. Some states have an income tax similar to that of the federal government. Of course, the percentage for the state tax is lower. Other states have a sales tax, which is a percentage charged to any item which you buy in that state. For example, a person might want to buy a packet of cigarettes for twenty-five cents. If there is a sales tax of eight percent in that state, then the cost of the cigarettes is twenty-seven cents. This figure includes the sales tax. Some states use income tax in addition to sales tax to raise their revenues. The state tax laws are diverse and confusing. The third tax is for the city. This tax comes in two forms: property tax(people who own a home have to pay taxes on it)and excise tax, which is charged on cars in a city. The cities use these funds for education, police and fire departments, public works and municipal buildings. Since Americans pay such high taxes, they often feel that they are working one day each week just to pay their taxes. People always complain about taxes. They often protest that the government uses their tax dollars in the wrong way. They say that it spends too much on useless and impractical programs. Although Americans have different views on many issues, they tend to agree on one subject: Taxes are too high.

单选题Without facts, we cannot form a correct opinion, for we need to have actual knowledge ______our thinking.

单选题Better modeling, more wisely applied, would have helped, Mr. Lindsey said, but so would have common sense in senior management.

单选题It is an unfortunate fact that most North Americans know little about American Indian culture and history. Scholars have studied such matters, but they have not succeeded in broadcasting their conclusions widely. Thus, it is still not widely known that American Indians have epics, that they performed plays long before Europeans arrived, and that they practiced politics and carried on trade. One way to gain a fuller appreciation of this rich culture is to examine American Indian poetry, for poetry is in all cultures the most central and articulate of the arts. It is especially important that we study American Indian poetry as this poetry can create a context that gives cohesive expression to the crafts, the artifacts, and the isolated facts that many Americans have managed to notice willy-nilly. Even a survey of American Indian poetry reveals a range of poetic thought and technique that defies easy generalization. Jarold Ramsey hazards a summary, however, which serves at least to give the uninitiated reader some sense of what American Indian poetry is like. Overall, he writes, it represents " an oral, formulaic, traditional, and anonymous art form," whose approach is to emphasize the "mythic and sacred" components of reality. It "flourished through public performances... by skilled recitalists whose audiences already knew the individual stories" and valued the performers for their "ability to exploit their material dramatically and to combine them[their stories]in longer cycles" rather than for their "plot invention. " Because this poetry belongs to highly ethnocentric tribal peoples, whose cultures " we still do not know much about," it " is likely to seem all the more terse, even cryptic. American Indian poetry has another feature that Ramsey ignores: it is always functional. Whether sung, chanted, or recited; whether performed ceremonially, as entertainment, or as part of a task such as curing a patient or grinding corn; or whether recited individually or by a group, it is always fully woven into the fabric of ordinary life. For complicated reasons, American Indian poetry has basically been ignored by non-Indian cultures. Kenneth Lincoln writes that failure to hear American Indian voices results " partly... from the tragedies of tribal dislocation, partly from mistranslation, partly from misconceptions about literature, partly from cultural indifference. " Brian Swann suggests an additional explanation; tribal poetry is oral, whereas Europeans arrived in the New World with a deeply ingrained belief in the primacy of the written word. As a result, European settlers found it hard to imagine that poetry could exist without written texts and thus that the American Indians had achieved something parallel to what Europeans called literature long before Europeans arrived. As a consequence, Europeans did not fully respond to the rich vitality of American Indian poetry.

单选题TEXT B A closer observer of the small screen once called it a "vast wasteland of violence, sadism and murder, private eyes, gangsters and more violence-and cartoons." That is how Newton Minow, a US television regulator, described it in 1961. Since then television language has become more colourful, violence more explicit and sex more prevalent. Lady Chatterley's Lover has moved from the banned book shelf to a classic BBC serial. Concern over such changing standards has shaped our view of television and masked its broader influence in developing countries. To illustrate its effects, Kenny cites the case of Brazil. When television there began to show a steady diet of local soaps in the 1970s, Brazilian women typically had five or more children and were trapped in poverty. As the popularity of the soaps grew, birth rates fell. According to researchers, 72% of the leading female characters in the main soaps had no children and only 7% had more than one. One study calculated that such soaps had the same effect on fertility rates as keeping girls in school for five years more than normal. It is not just birth rates that are affected. Kenny notes: "Kids who watch TV out of school, according to a World Bank survey of young people in the shanty towns of Fortaleza in Brazil, are considerably less likely to consume drugs." Television appears to have more power to reduce youth drug use than the strictures of an educated mother and Brazilian soaps presenting educated urban women running their own businesses are thought to be compelling role models. Television can also improve health, In Ghana a soap opera line that warned mothers they were feeding their children "more than just rice" if they did not wash their hands after defecating was followed by a seemingly permanent improvement in personal hygiene. Why do such changes happen? Simple, says Kenny: soap operas, whether local versions of Ugly Betty or vintage imports of Baywatch, open up new horizons. "Some hours could he better spout planting trees, helping old ladies across the road or playing cricket," he said. "But watching TV exposes people to new ideas and different people. With that will come greater opportunity, growing equality and a better understanding of the world. Not bad./