单选题He Uinspired/U many young people to take up the sport.

单选题They have been living under the most {{U}}appalling{{/U}} conditions for two years. A. dreadful B. bad C. unpleasant D. poor

单选题 Something Men Do Not Like to Do Eric Brown hates shopping. "It's just not enjoyable to me," said the 28-year-old Chicago man who was carrying several shopping bags along the city's main street, Michigan Avenue. "When I'm out {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}, I basically know what I want to get. I rush in. I buy it. I {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}." Common wisdom says that guys hate to shop. You can ask generations of men. But people who study shopping say that a number of social, cultural and economic factors are now {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}this "men-hate-to-shop" notion. "{{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}social class, ethnicity, age-men say they hate to shop," says Sharon Zukin, a City University of New York sociology professor. "Yet when you ask them deeper questions, it turns out that they {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}to shop. Men generally like to shop for {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}, music and hardware. But if you ask them about the shopping they do for books or music, they'll say that's not shopping. That's {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}." In other words, what men and women call "buying things" and how they approach that task are {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Women will {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}through several 1,000-square-metre stores in search of the perfect party dress. Men will wander through 100 Internet sites in search of the {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}digital camcorder. Women see shopping as a social event. Men see it as a mission or a {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}to be won. "Men are frequently shopping to win," says Mary Ann McGrath, a marketing professor at Loyola University of Chicago. "They want to get the best deal. They want to get the best one, the last one and if they do that it {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}them happy." When women shop, "they're doing it in a way where they want {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}to be very happy," says McGrath. "They're kind of shopping for love." In fact, it is in clothing where we see a male-female {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}most clearly. Why, grumble some men, are all male clothes navy, grey, black or brown? But would they wear light green and pink? These days, many guys wear a sort of "uniform" says Paco Underhill, author of Why We Bye. "It's been hard for them to understand what it means to be fashion. Conscious in a business way. It becomes much easier if you {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}your range of choices."

单选题Beavers have the {{U}}aptitude{{/U}} to build dams.

单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}} {{B}}Single-parent Kids Do Best{{/B}} Single mums are better at raising their kids than two parents - at least in the bird world. Mother zebra finches have to work harder and raise fewer chicks on their own, but they also produce more attractive sons who are more likely to get a mate. The finding shows that family conflict is as important an evolutionary driving force as ecological factors such as hunting and food supply. With two parents around, there's always a conflict of interests, which can have a detrimental effect on the quality of the offspring. In evolutionary terms, the best strategy for any parent in the animal world is to find someone else to care for their offspring, so they can concentrate on breeding again. So it's normal for parents to try to pass the buck to each other. But Ian Hartley from the University of Lancaster and his team wondered how families solve this conflict, and how the conflict itself affects the offspring. To find out, they measured how much effort zebra finch parents put into raising their babies. They compared single females with pairs, by monitoring the amount of food each parent collected, and removing or adding chicks so that each pair of birds was raising four chicks, and each single mum had two - supposedly the same amount of work. But single mums, they found, put in about 25 per cent more effort than females rearing with their mate. To avoid being exploited, mothers with a partner hold back from working too hard if the father is being lazy, and it's the chicks that pay the price. "The offspring suffer some of the cost of this conflict," says Hartley. The cost does not show in any obvious decrease in size or weight, but in how attractive they are to the opposite sex. When the chicks were mature, the researchers tested the "fitness" of the male offspring by offering females their choice of partner. Those males reared by single mums were chosen more often than those from two-parent families. Sexual conflict has long been thought to affect the quality of care given to offspring, says zoologist Rebecca Kilner at Cambridge University, who works on conflict of parents in birds. "But the experimental evidence is not great. The breakthrough here is showing it empirically." More surprising, says Kilner, is Hartley's statement that conflict may be a strong influence on the evolution of behaviour, clutch size and even appearance. "People have not really made that link," says Hartley. A female's reproductive strategy is usually thought to be affected by hunting and food supply. Kilner says conflict of parents should now be taken into account as well.

单选题A health expert devised a new method to check our health conditions.A. taughtB. foundC. learnedD. invented

单选题Her comments about men are utterly ridiculous completely.

单选题The doctors performed a heart operation that was a {{U}}miracle{{/U}} of medical skill.

单选题The Drive for the Future Driverless ears Professor Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, wants to cut the number of ears on planet earth by 50%. He said: "It's a huge waste of money and resources to do so—we use ears about 3% of the time. " Professor Thrun is a leader in the field of driverless Cars and has built two robotic vehiclescalled Stanley and Junior. The cars have no human driver and no remote control system—everything from sensors to navigation is handled by an onboard computer. They were both entered into the DARPA Grand Challenge—a race for autonomous vehicles. Stanley won in 2004 and Junior took second place in 2007. But the ultimate goal is to create a world where self - aware vehicles can drive passengers around without hitting pedestrians or bumping into other vehicles. "To be able to understand the environment as deep as humans do is the holy grail of artificial intelligence. " "It's a huge amount of work to make computers understand what is the behaviour of the two people on the right, both waiting at an intersection—will they walk or not? It is a really hard question. " Perfect missions Researchers at Stanford are trying to program helicopters to fly perfect missions every time including loops. Imagine, for example, a search and rescue chopper that can descend into a narrow canyon countless times without its rotors ever touching the edges. Andrew Ng, an associate professor in the Computer Science Department, said it would be very difficult to write software to make a helicopter early out stunts in the air. Instead, researchers asked a expert human pilot to demonstrate the stunts. The computer learned from the demonstrations how to fly by itself. It is called apprenticeship learning—the computer figures out what the human pilot is trying to do and then uses algorithms to correct or perfect the operations. Professor Ng said:" The accelerometers of the helicopter will feel the force of the wind pushing the helicopter aside and what the helicopter has learned to do is how to adjust the controls to move itself back onto the desired flight path. /

单选题 A Country's Standard of Living The "standard of living" of any country means the average person's share of the goods and services the country produces. A country's standard of living, (51) , depends on its capacity to produce wealth. "Wealth" (52) this sense is not money, for we do not live on money (53) on things that money can buy: "goods" such as food and clothing, and "services" such as transport and entertainment. A country's capacity to produce wealth depends upon many factors, most of (54) have an effect on one another. Wealth depends (55) a great extent upon a country's natural resources. Some regions of the world are well supplied with coal and minerals, and have fertile (肥沃的) soil and a favorable climate; other regions possess none of them. Next to natural resources (56) the ability to turn them to use. China is perhaps as well-off (57) the USA in natural resources, but suffered for many years from civil and external wars, and. (58) this and other reasons was (59) to develop her resources. Sound and stable political conditions, and (60) from foreign invasions, enable a country to develop its natural resources peacefully and steadily, and to produce more wealth than another country equally well favoured by nature but less well ordered. A country's standard of living does not only depend upon the wealth that is produced and consumed. (61) its own borders, but also upon what is directly produced through international trade. (62) , Britain's wealth in foodstuffs and other agricultural products would be much less if she had to depend only on (63) grown at home. Trade makes it possible for her surplus (过剩的) manufactured goods to be traded abroad for the agricultural products that would. (64) be lacking. A country's wealth is, therefore, much (65) by its manufacturing capacity, provided (如果) that other countries can be found ready to accept its manufactures.

单选题Who Wrote Frankenstein? It began as a game to pass the time while the rain fell and lightning struck. Visiting Switzerland in June 1816, a small group—young, amorous and ever so literary—agreed to a ghost -story -writing contest. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, just 18, could come up with nothing at first. Then she had a nightmare—a walking corpse, glimmering yellow eyes. It delighted her. The next day, she announced to the others that she had imagined a story. Frankenstein was born. Two years later Frankenstein; or, the Modem Prometheus was published anonymously. Some readers guessed the author was the poet Percy Shelley, who had written the novel's preface. Those who knew that the author was Percy's (by then) wife, Mary Shelley, were amazed. In an introduction to a revised 1831 edition, she told the Gothic tale of the ghost- story contest. (Percy, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary's stepsister, Claire, were the others present. ) As for Percy, she" certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling" in the book, but she did depend upon his encouragement and more. The question of whether Mary Mone wrote the novel, however, would not die. The answer matters, and not only because scholars who once regarded Frankenstein as merely a potboiler now consider it a progenitor of science fiction, a monument of Romantic literature, and a landmark text in gender studies. The answer matters because Frankenstein so beautifully explores the consequences of living and working in isolation. After cloistering himself to bring dead flesh to life, Victor Frankenstein condemns his creature to loneliness. By examining Mary's original drafts, Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson identified Percy's contributions to Frankenstein and, in 1996, edited a reproduction of Mary's notebooks for scholarly audiences. Now he has published The Original Frankenstein; or, the Modem Prometheus, by Mary Shelley( with Percy Shelley). "The novel was conceived and mainly written by Mary Shelley," Robinson writes in his introduction, but he estimates that Percy wrote "at least"4,000 to 5,000 words of the 72,000 total. Percy may have corrected Mary's parallel constructions, but he also mucked up her more straight forward language.

单选题A Pay Rise or Not "Unless I get a rise, I'll have a talk with the boss, Henry Manley. "George Strong said to himself. George liked his job and he liked the town he lived in, but his wife kept telling him that his pay was not enough to meet the needs of the family. That was why he was thinking of taking a job in Birmingham, a nearby city about 50 miles away. He had been offered a job in a factory there, and the pay was far better. George lived in Wyeford, a medium-sized town. He really liked the place and didn't like the idea of moving somewhere else, but if he took the job in Birmingham, he would have to move his family there. Henry Manley was the manager of a small company manufacturing electric motors. The company was in deep trouble because, among other reasons, the Japanese were selling such things at very low prices. As a result, Manley had to cut his own prices and profits as well. Otherwise he would not get any orders at all. Even then, orders were still not coming in fast enough, so that there was no money for raises (加工资) for his workers. Somehow, he had to struggle along and keep his best workers as well. He sighed. Just then the phone rang. His secretary told him that George Strong wanted to see him as soon as possible. Manley sighed again. He could guess what it was about. George Strong was a very young engineer. The company had no future unless it could attract and keep men like him. Manley rubbed his forehead (前额), his problems seemed endless.

单选题There is a growing gap between the rich and the poor.

单选题Archaeologists have discovered {{U}}fossils{{/U}} of million-year-old animals in excavations.

单选题We should never content ourselves with only a little knowledge.A. convinceB. satisfyC. comfortD. benefit

单选题I haven't entered your name and occupation yet.

单选题The poet William Carlos Williams was a New Jersey physician .

单选题The Little Foxes, a {{U}}drama{{/U}} by Lillian Hellman, was first produced in New York in 1939.

单选题Things have changed a lot since I was a child.A. graduallyB. suddenlyC. frequentlyD. greatly

单选题Man of Few Words Everyone chases success, but not all of US want to be famous. South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee is 1 for keeping himself to himself. When the 63-year-old was named the 2003 Nobel Prize winner for literature earlier this month, reporters were warned that they would find him "particularly difficult to 2 ." Coetzee lives in Australia but spends part of the year teaching at the University of Chicago. He seemed 3 by the news he won the $1.3 million prize. "It came as a complete surprise. I wasn"t even aware they were due to make the announcement." he said. His 4 of privacy led to doubts as to whether Coetzee will attend the prize-giving in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10. But despite being described as 5 to track down, we critics agree that his writing is easy to get to know. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, to all English-speaking family, Coetzee 6 his breakthrough in 1980 with the novel "Waiting for the Barbarians". He 7 his place among the world"s leading writers with two Booker prize victories, Britain"s highest honour for novels. He first 8 in 1983 for the "Life and Times of Michael K" and his second title came in 1999 for "Disgrace". A major theme in his work is South Africa"s former apartheid system, which divided whites from blacks. 9 with the problems of violence, crime and racial division that still exist in the country, his books have enabled ordinary people to understand apartheid 10 within. "I have always been more interested in the past than the future." he said in a rare interview. "The past 11 its shadow over the present. I hope I have made one or two people think 12 about whether they want to forget the past completely." In fact this purity in his writing seems to be 13 in his personal life. Coetzee is a vegetarian, a cyclist rather than a motorist and doesn"t drink alcohol. But what he has 14 to literature, culture and the people of South Africa is far greater than the things he has given up. "In looking at weakness and failure in life," the Nobel prize judging panel said, "Coetzee"s work 15 the divine spark in man."