单选题{{B}}第二篇{{/B}} {{B}}Supermarket{{/B}} Most supermarkets need a very large floor area, sometimes at least ten times as big as that of an ordinary shop. There are usually two doors, one as an entrance and the other as an exit. The rest of the side facing the street is largely of plate grass, with goods or advertising materials displayed. The other three walls are normally decorated in light colors, giving an impression of cleanliness (清洁) and brightness. Most supermarkets are on one floor only, goods being stored in rooms at the hack or upstairs. At right-angles to the window stretch long structures about six feet high with a number of shelves on each side. Similar shelf units or frozen food containers extend round the walls. Broad aisles (通道) between the shelf units and ample (足够的) space between them and the window and also the far wall allow room for the circulation of many people. Individual commodities (商品), in tins, bags, boxes or other containers, are stacked (堆放) in groups on the shelves, and each group is labeled with a price ticket. Metal baskets near the entrance are taken by the shoppers who collect in them the goods they select from the shelves. Between the shelf units and the window in one half of the shops are a number of small counters about three feet high. Beside each sits a cashier (现金出纳员), who operates a machine for totaling the cost of each customers' purchases. The customer places the basket at one end of the counter so that ii can be emptied by the cashier who records the price of the commodities one by one, before putting each on a moving section of the counter top. The goods are collected and packed into the customer's hag by another assistant at the end of the counter. The cashier finally hands a printed slip recording all prices to the customer, who pays the total, collects the bag and leaves.

单选题The factory is due to be pulled down next year.

单选题The osprey flies above the water and when it spots a fish it swoops down to catch it.

单选题Have you got Ua spare/U pen?

单选题There are {{U}}notices{{/U}} to the contrary, a great deal of technical writing is at best awkward and at worst actually unclear.

单选题They agreed to settle the dispute by peaceful means.

单选题Coming Soon to a Theater Near You! What are special effects? Do you enjoy movies that use a lot of special effects? Dinosaurs from the distant past! Space battles from the distant future! There has been a revolution in special effects, and it has transformed the movies we see. The revolution began in the mid-1970s with George Lucas"s Star Wars , a film that stunned (使震惊) audiences. That revolution continues to the present, with dramatic changes in special-effects technology. The company behind these changes is Lucas"s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). And the man behind the company is Dennis Muren, who has worked with Lucas since Star Wars. Muren"s interest in special effects began very early. At age 6, he was photographing toy dinosaurs and spaceships. By 10, he had an 8-millimeter movie camera and was making these things move through stop-motion. (Stop-motion is a process in which objects are shot with a camera, moved slightly, shot again, and so on. When the shots are put together, the objects appear to move. ) Talk to Muren and you"ll understand what ILM is all about: taking on new challenges. By 1989, Muren decided he had pushed the old technology as far as it would go. He saw computer graphics (CG) technology as the wave of the future and took a year off to master it. With CG technology, images can be scanned into a computer for processing, for example, and many separate shots can be combined into a single image. CG technology has now reached the point, Muren says, where special effects can be used to do just about anything so that movies can tell stories better than ever be-tore. The huge success of Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World , the stars of which were computer-generated dinosaurs, suggests that this may very well be true.

单选题Some Things We Know about Language Many things about language are a mystery, and many will always remain so. But some things we do know. First, we know that all human beings have a language of some sort. There is no race of men anywhere on earth so backward that it has no language, no set of speech sounds by which the people communicate with one mother. Furthermore, in historical times, there has never been a race of men without a language. Second, there is no such thing as a primitive language. There are many people whose cultures are undeveloped, who are, as we say, uncivilized, but the languages they speak are not primitive. In all known languages we can see complexities that must have been tens of thousands of years in developing. This has not always been well understood; indeed, the direct contrary has often been stated. Popular ideas of the language of the American Indians will illustrate. Many people have supposed that the Indians communicated in a very primitive system of noises. Study has proved this to be nonsense. There are, or were, hundreds of American Indian languages, and all of them turn out to be very complicated and very old. They are certainly different from the languages that most of us are familiar with, but they are no more primitive five than English and Greek. A third thing we know about language is that all languages are perfectly adequate. That is, each one is a perfect means of expressing the culture of the people who speak the language. Finally, we know that language changes. It is natural and normal for language to change; the only languages which do not change are the dead ones. This is easy to understand if we look backward in time. Change goes on in all aspects of language. Grammatical features change as do speech sounds, and changes in vocabulary are sometimes very extensive and may occur very rapidly. Vocabulary is the least stable part of any language.

单选题Eruptions of Mount Saint Helens On March 27, the US Government scientists made a decision after they predicted the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. They telephoned all state and local officials in the area and told them that a serious eruption was possible at any time. Roads were closed to every one except scientists and forest keepers struggled to keep curious visitors away from the mountain. Shortly afternoon on March 27, Mount Saint Helens erupted for the first time in 123 years. People living north of the mountain heard a loud boom that shook their windows, and airline pilots flying near the volcano soon afterwards described a thick black column of ash and steam shooting more than 2,100 meters into the sky. Later, scientists found that the explosion had made a new crater (大坑) in the top of the mountain, not far from the old crater. The north side of the peak now had a huge bulge (凸出部分) where rock and ice had been pushed out by the eruption. A second eruption shook the mountain on March 28. It, too, sent up a column of black ash high into the sky. By March 29, scientists flying over the mountain saw that a second crater formed about 9 meters from the first one. Strange blue flames flickered (闪烁) inside the crater and sometimes jumped from one crater to the other. By April the mountain had erupted several more times and the snow on the north slope of the peak was black with ash. Ash carried by the wind had fallen on towns as far as 240 kilometers away from Mount Saint Helens. During the first week of April, Mount Saint Helens gave scientists something new to worry about: harmonic tremors (震动) recorded by scientists showed a big eruption would happen. All during April and into May Mount Saint Helens continued to shudder (震动) and shoot out ash. By April 8, two craters had merged to from a vast hole nearly a half of a kilometer wide and 250 meters deep. Scientists' main worry during this time was the growing bulge of rock and ice on, the north face of the mountain. By May 7 scientists feared the worst. Their warnings led Washington Governor to set up safety zones around the mountain. The inner "red" zone was open to scientists only. The outer "blue" zone was open only to people who got special permits. But in spite of these warnings, some people got past the road barriers and risked their lives trying to get close to the volcano.

单选题 {{B}}Northern Territory{{/B}} It was 3:45 in the morning when the vote was finally taken. After six months of arguing and final 16 hours of hot parliamentary debates, Australia's Northern Territory became the first legal authority in the world to allow doctors to take the lives of incur able ill patients who wish to die. The measure passed by the convincing vote of 15 to 10. Almost immediately word flashed on the Internet and was picked up, half a world away, by John Hofsess, executive director of the Right to Die Society of Canada. He sent it on via the group's on-line service, Death NET. Says Hofsess: "We posted bulletins all day long, because of course this isn't just something that happened in Australia. It's world history." The full import may take a while to sink in. The NT Rights of the Terminally Ill law has left physicians and citizens alike trying to deal with its moral and practical implications. Some have breathed sighs of relief, others, including churches, right-to-life groups and the Australian Medical Association bitterly attacked the bill and the haste of its passage. But the tide is unlikely to turn back. In Australia—where an aging population, life—extending technology and changing community attitudes have all played their part-other states are going to consider making a similar law to deal with euthanasia. In the US and Canada, where the right-to-die movement is gathering strength, observers are waiting for the dominoes to start falling. Under the new Northern Territory law, an adult patient can request death—probably by a deadly injection or pill—to put an end to suffering. The patient must be diagnosed as terminally ill by two doctors. After a "cooling off" period of seven days, the patient can sign a certificate of request. After 48 hours the wish for death can be met. "I'm not afraid of dying from a spiritual point of view, but what I was afraid of was how I'd go, because I've watched people die in the hospital fighting for oxygen and clawing at their masks, "said Lloyd Nickson, a 54-year-old Darwin resident suffering from lung cancer.

单选题Poor health and lack of money may be both to educational progress roadblocks. A. restraints B. stains C. scarcities D. barriers

单选题I am not sure whether I can gain any profit from the investment, so I can't make a (n) {{U}}definite{{/U}} promise to help you.

单选题What did he do all this for?

单选题The Beginning of American Literature America has always been a land of beginnings. After Europeans "discovered" America in the fifteenth century, the mysterious New World became for many people a genuine hope of a new life, an escape from poverty and persecution, a chance to start again. We can say that, as a nation, America begins with that hope. When, however, does American literature begin? American literature begins with American experiences. Long before the first colonists arrived, before Christopher Columbus, before the Northmen who "found" America about the year 1000, native Americans lived here. Each tribe"s literature was tightly woven into the fabric of daily life and reflected the unmistakably American experience of linking with the land. Another kind of experience, one filled with fear and excitement, found its expression in the reports that Columbus and other explorers sent home in Spain, French and English. In addition, the journals of the people who lived and died in the New England wilderness tell unforgettable tales of hard and sometimes heartbreaking experiences of those early years. Experience, then, is the key to early American literature. The New World provided a great variety of experiences, and these experiences demanded a wide variety of expressions by an even wider variety of early American writers. These writers included John Smith, who spent only two-and-a-haft year on the American continent. They included Jonathan Edwards and William Byrd, who thought of themselves as British subjects, never suspecting a revolution that would create a United States of America with a literature of its own. American Indians, explorers, Puritan ministers, frontier wives, plantation owners—they are all the creators of the first American literature.

单选题Who Came First, the Chicken or the Egg ? I just mailed the chicken and the egg, each in its own separate packaging, and kept careful track of when each shipment was sent from a post office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when it later arrived at its intended destination in New York City. In mailing the chicken, I was careful to adhere to the restrictions described in the American Postal Service's Domestic Mail Manual 57, as updated on April 3, 2003. This, the most recent, version of the Manual states that: "Adult chickens must be sent by Express Mail. The containers used must pass the standards in International Safe Transit Association Test Procedure IA; be strong enough to endure normal handling; and ensure enough air for the chickens in transit... The number of birds must not be more than 1he container's limit. " I mailed the chicken in a wooden box got from a colleague who does research with birds. Then, I mailed the egg in standard packaging obtained through an industrial supplier. It's quite simple. I posted both the chicken and the egg at 9. 40 am, on a Monday morning, from the Harvard Square post office, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The staff there told me that this was the first chicken anyone had mailed from there in recent memory, and perhaps ever. They handled both the chicken and the egg skillfully and politely. The intended destination for both packages was the James A. Farley General Post Office, which is located in Manhattan right next to the Penn Station train terminal. I took the subway from the Harvard Square to the Boston train station, and from there boarded a train to New York City, a distance of about 320 kilometers, arriving lhat afternoon at Penn Station. I immediately went to the post office, to await the arrivals of the chicken and the egg. The James A. Farley General Post Office is open 24 hours a day, so I was able to wait there until both items arrived. I inquired once per hour for both the chicken and the egg. That day, Monday, neither the chicken nor the egg arrived. The next day, Tuesday, neither the chicken nor the egg arrived. The chicken arrived at 10:31 am, Wednesday. The staff at the post office told me that this was the first chicken anyone had mailed to the post office in recent memory, and perhaps ever. The egg arrived that same day, at 9. 37pm, 11 hours after the chicken. Based on experiment data, it's now quite clear that the chicken came first, the egg second.

单选题The next morning she told us that the last question didn't depart till well after midnight. A. go B. leave C. come D. appear

单选题The story was touching .

单选题The project required ten years of diligent research.

单选题Oil and Economy Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December. This near-tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979— 1980, when they also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time? The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term. Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude oil have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past. Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energy-intensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consultancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP (inconstant prices) rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $22 a barrel for a lull year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25%～0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies—to which heavy industry has shifted—have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed. One more reason not to lose sleep over the rise in oil prices is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not occurred against the background of general commodity-price inflation and global excess demand. A sizable portion of the world is only just emerging from economic decline. The Economist"s commodity price index is broadly unchanging from a year ago. In 1973 commodity prices jumped by 70%, and in 1979 by almost 30%.

单选题Seeing the World Centuries Ago If you enjoy looking through travel books by such familiar authors as Arthur Frommer or Eugene Fodor, it will not surprise you to learn that travel writing has a long and venerable history. Almost from the earliest annals of recorded time individuals have found ready audiences for their accounts of journeys to strange and exotic locales. One of the earliest travel writers, a Greek geographer and historian named Strabo, lived around the time of Christ. Though Strabo is known to have traveled from east of the Black Seawest to Italy and as far south as Ethiopia, he also used details gleaned from other writers to extend and enliven his accounts. His multivolumed work Geography provides the only surviving account of the cities, peoples, customs, and geographical peculiarities of the whole known world of his time. Two other classic travel writers, the Italian Marco Polo and the Moroccan Ibn Battutah, lived in roughly the same time period. Marco Polo traveled to China with his father and uncle in about A. D. 1275 and remained there 16 or 17 years, visiting several other countries during his travels. When Marco returned to Italy he dictated his memoirs, including stories he had heard from others, to a scribe, with the resulting book [[ millione being an instant success. Though difficult to attest to the accuracy of all he says, Marco's book impelled Europeans to begin their great voyages of exploration. Ibn Battutah's interest in travel began on his required Muslim journey to Mecca in 1325, and during his lifetime he journeyed through all the countries where Islam held sway. His travel book the Rihlah is a personalized account of desert journeys, court intrigues, and even the effect of the Black Death in the various lands he visited. In almost 30 years of traveling it is estimated that Ibn Battutah covered more than 75,000 miles.