单选题Milosevic"s Death
Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was found dead last Saturday in his cell at the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The 64-year-old had been on trial there since February 2002.
Born in provincial Pozarevac in 1941, he was the second son of a priest and a school teacher. Both of his parents died when he was still a young adult. The young Milosevic was "untypical", says Slavolub Djukic, his unofficial biographer. He was "not interested in sports, avoided excursions (短途旅行) and used to come to school dressed in the old-fashioned way—white shirt and tie." One of his old friends said, he could "imagine him as a station-master or punctilious (一丝不苟) civil servant."
Indeed that is exactly what he might have become, had he not married Mira. She was widely believed to be his driving force.
At university and beyond he did well. He worked for various firms and was a communist party member. By 1986 he was head of Serbia"s Central Committee. But still he had not yet really been noticed.
It was Kosovo that gave him his chance. An autonomous province of Serbia, Kosovo was home to an Albanian majority and a Serbian minority. In 1989, he was sent there to calm fears of Serbians who felt they were discriminated against. But instead he played the nationalist card and became their champion. In so doing, he changed into a ruthless (无情的) and determined man. At home with Mira he plotted the downfall of his political enemies. Conspiring (密谋) with the director of Serbian T. V., he mounted a modern media campaign which aimed to get him the most power in the country.
He was elected Serbian president in 1990. In 1997, he became president of Yugoslavia. The rest of the story is well-known: his nationalist card caused Yugoslavia"s other ethnic groups to fight for their own rights, power and lands. Yugoslavia broke up when four of the six republics declared independence in 1991. War started and lasted for years and millions died. Then Western countries intervened. N.A.T.O. bombed Yugoslavia, and he eventually stepped down as state leader in 2000.
Soon after this, Serbia"s new government, led by Zoran Djindjic, arrested him and sent him to face justice at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in the Hague.
单选题The passage is most likely written for researchers.
单选题Durihg his lifetime he was able to
accumulate
quite a fortune.
单选题
Pool Watch Swimmers
can drown in busy swimming pools when lifeguards fail to notice that they are in
trouble. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says that on average
15 people drown in British pools each year, but many more suffer major injury
after getting into difficulties. Now a French company has developed an
artificial intelligence system called Poseidon that sounds the alarm when it
sees someone in danger of drowning. When a swimmer sinks
towards the bottom of the pool, the new system sends an alarm signal to a
poolside monitoring station and a lifeguard's pager. In trials at a pool in
Ancenis, near Nantes, it saved a life within just a few months, says Alistair
McQuade, a spokesman for its maker, Poseidon Technologies.
Poseidon keeps watch through a network of underwater and overheard video
cameras. AI software analyses the images to work out swimmers trajectories. To
do this reliably, it has to tell the difference between a swimmer and the shadow
of someone being cast onto the bottom or side of the pool. "The underwater
environment is a very dynamic one, with many shadows and reflections dancing
around," says McQuade. The software does this by "projecting" a
shape in its field of view onto an image of the far wall of the pool. It does
the same with an image from another camera viewing the shape from a different
angle. If the two projections are in the same position, the shape is identified
as a shadow and is ignored. But if they are different, the shape is a swimmer
and so the system follows its trajectory. To pick out potential
drowning victims, anyone in the water who starts to descend slowly is added to
the software's "pre-alert" list, says McQuade. Swimmers who then stay immobile
on the pool bottom for 5 seconds or more are {{U}}considered{{/U}} in danger of
drowning. Poseidon double-checks that the image really is of a swimmer, not a
shadow, by seeing whether it obscures the pool's floor texture when viewed from
overhead. If so, it alerts the lifeguard, showing the swimmer's location on a
poolside screen. The first full-scale Poseidon system will be
officially opened next week at a pool in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. One man
who is impressed with the idea is Trevor Baylis, inventor of the clockwork
radio. Baylis runs a company that installs swimming pools, and he was once an
underwater escapologist with a circus. "I say full marks to them if this works
and can save lives," he says. But he adds that any local authority spending
£30,000-plus on a Poseidon system ought to be investing similar amounts in
teaching children to swim.
单选题下面有篇短文,每篇短文后有道题,每题后面有个选项。请仔细阅读短文并根据短文回答其后面的问题,从4个选项中选择1个最佳答案。{{B}}第一篇{{/B}}
Silence Please If there
is one group of workers across the Western world who will be glad that Christmas
is over, that group is shop workers. It is not that they like to
complain. They realize that they are going to be rushed off their feet at
Christmas. They know that their employers need happy customers to make their
profits that pay their wages. But there is one thing about working in a shop
over Christmas that is too bad to tolerate. That thing is music.
These days, all shops and many offices have what is known as "Piped music"
or "muzak" playing for all the hours that they are open. Muzak has an odd
history. During the 1940s, music was played to cows as part of a scientific
experiment. It was found that cows which listened to simple, happy music
produced more milk. Perhaps workers and customers who listened to simple, happy
music would be more productive and spend more money. In fact,
nobody knows what effect playing muzak in shops has on profits. It is simply
something that everybody does. But we are learning more about the effect of
constantly repeated hearings of songs on the people who have to hear them all
the time. Research shows that repeated hearings of complex
pieces of music bring greater enjoyment before becoming tiresome. And that point
come much sooner with simple songs. "That's especially the case
with tunes that are already familiar. Once that tipping point3 is reached,
repeated listening become unpleasant, says Professor John Sloboda of UK's Keele
University's music psychology group. "And the less control you have over what
you hear, the less you like it. That's why police forces in the
US often try and resolve hostage situations by playing pop songs over and over
again at high volume. Eventually, it becomes too much for the criminals to stand
and they give up. The problem gets particularly bad at
Christmas, when the muzak consists entirely of the same few festive tunes played
over and over again. What makes it worse for the shop workers is that they
already know these runes. They get bored very quickly. Then they get irritated.
Then they get angry. Shop workers in Austria recently threatened
to go on strike for the right to silence. "Shop workers can't escape the
Christmas muzak. They feel as if they are terrorized all day. Especially 'Jingle
Bells'. It arouses aggressive feelings," said Gottfried Rieser, of the Austrian
shop worker's union. It is not just shop workers who complain. A
survey this year by UK recruitment website Retailchoice. com found that
Christmas is not only the most testing time for shop workers, but that almost
half had complaints from customers about muzak. And the British Royal National
Institute for the Deaf estimates that some stores play Jingle Bells 300 times
each year. "That's acoustic torture, says Nigel Rodgers of
Pipedown. A group against muzak. "It's not loud but the repetitive nature causes
psychological stress. " The group wants the government to
legislate against unwanted music in stores, hospitals, airports, swimming pools
and other public places, claiming it raises the blood pressure and depresses the
immune system. Perhaps groups like Pipedown don't really have
much to complain about. After all, surely the real point is that people have
money to spend. Why complain about a bit of
music?
单选题Such a database would be extremely costly to
set up
.
单选题In Britain people
use up
four million tons of potatoes every year.
单选题Henry"s news report covering the conference was so
comprehensive
that nothing had been omitted.
单选题I"m planning to hold a party in the open air, but I can make no guarantees because it
depends on
the weather.
单选题Can you spot the {{U}}flaw{{/U}} in their argument?
单选题The word "spectres" in the second paragraph is closest in meaning to
单选题Can you find out the
flaw
in their research papers?
单选题The waitress showed me to the table we have booked this afternoon.A. invitedB. toldC. ledD. pointed
单选题The performance was
pretty
impressive.
单选题{{B}}第三篇{{/B}}
Common Problems, Common
Solutions The chances are that you made up your
mind about smoking a long time ago and decided it's not for you.
The chances are equally good that you know a lot of smokers — there are,
after all about 60 million of them, work with them, and get along with them very
well. And finally it's a pretty safe bet that you're
open-minded and interested in all the various issues about smokers and
non-smokers — or you wouldn't be reading this. And those three
things make you incredibly(难以置信的) important today.
Because they mean that yours is the voice — not the smoker's
and not the anti-smoker's — that will determine how much of society's efforts
should go into building walls that separate us and how much into the search for
solutions that bring us together. For one tragic result of the
emphasis on building walls is the diversion(转移) of
millions of dollars from scientific research on the causes and cures of diseases
which, when all is said and done, still strike the nonsmoker as well as the
smoker. One prominent(卓越的) health organization, to cite(引证) but a single
instance, now spends 28 cents of every publicly contributed dollar on
"education" (much of it in antismoking propaganda)and only 2 cents on research.
There will always be some who want to build wails, who want to
separate people from people, and up to a point, even these may serve society.
The anti-smoking wall-builders have, to give them their due, helped to make us
all more keenly aware of choice. But our guess, and certainly
our hope, is that you are among the far greatest number who know that walls are
only temporary(暂时的) at best, and that over the long run, we can serve society's
interest better by working together in mutual accommodation.
Whatever virtue walls may have, they can never move our society toward
fundamental solutions. People who work together on common problems, common
solutions, can.
单选题It has been said that the Acts provided a new course of action and did not merely
regulate
or enlarge an old one.
单选题The new type of car is fairly economical of fuel.
单选题All living organisms, regardless of their unique identity, have certain logical, chemical, and physical characteristics in common. A.as a result of B.considering C.on purpose D.whatever
单选题Shoplifters Most shoplifters (商店扒手) agree that the January sales offer wonderful opportunities for the hard-working thief. With the shops so crowded and the staff so busy, it does not require any extraordinary talent to help you to take one or two little things and escape unnoticed. It is known, in the business, as "hoisting". But the hoisting game is not what it used to be. Even at the height of the sales, shoplifters today never know if they are being watched by one of those evil little balls that hang from the ceilings of so many department stores above the most desirable goods. As if that was not trouble enough for them, they can now be filmed at work and obliged to attend a showing of their performance in court. Selfridges was the first big London store to install closed-circuit videotape equipment to watch its sales floors. In October last year the store won its first court case for shoplifting using a evidence a videotape clearly showing a couple stealing dresses. It was an important test case which encouraged other stores to install similar equipment. When the balls, called sputniks, first make an appearance in shops, it was widely believed that their only function was to frighten shoplifters. Their somewhat ridiculous appearances, the curious holes and red lights going on and off, certainly make the theory believable. It did not take long, however, for serious shoplifters to start showing suitable respect. Soon after the equipment was in operation at Selfridges, store detective Brian Chadwick was sitting in the control room watching a woman secretly putting bottles of perfume into her bag. "As she turned to go," Chadwick recalled, "she suddenly looked up at the 'sputnik' and stopped. She could not possibly have seen that the camera was trained on her because it is completely hidden, but she must have had a feeling that I was looking at her." "For a moment she paused, but then she returned to counter and started putting everything back. When she had finished, she opened her bag towards the camera to show it was empty and hurried out of the store./
单选题
Breakfast Studies show
that children who eat breakfast do better in school. It doesn't take much
further thought to believe that adults will feel better and perform better at
work as well. Whether you work at home, on the farm, at the office, at school,
or on the road, it is not a good idea to skip (故意略去) breakfast.
If we don't eat breakfast, we are likely to become tired when our brains and
bodies run low on fuel. By mid-morning, a lot of us grab a cup of coffee, or
wolf down a sugary candy bar to wake up again. This might work for a few
minutes, but by lunchtime we are hungry, bad-tempered, and perhaps our mood
might make us a little more likely to make unhealthy choices at lunch. Eating a
good breakfast sets the tone for the rest of the day. People
who eat breakfast are generally more likely to maintain a healthy weight. Many
people believe that they will lose weight if they skip meals, but that isn't a
good idea. The body expects to he refueled a few times a day, so start with a
healthy breakfast. A healthy breakfast should contain some
protein (蛋白质) and some fiber (纤维). Protein can come from meat, eggs, beans, or
soy (大豆). Fiber can be found in whole cereals (谷物), grains or in fruits. A good
example of a healthy breakfast might be something simple like a hard boiled egg,
an orange, and a bowl of whole grain cereal with soy milk.
